meteorite

REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — In a viral story, a woman from France told that she was injured by a rock falling from outer space. But experts argue it doesn’t look like a meteorite, but just an ordinary rock that exists on Earth.

The woman, a resident of Schirmeck in the French region of Bas-Rhin, said she was sitting on the terrace at around 4am local time on July 6, when she heard a shock on the roof.

Then a pebble fell from the roof and hit him around the ribs. He thought it was a piece of cement like on the ridge of the floor, but the color didn’t show it.

“I heard a big ‘boom’ coming from the roof. The next second, I felt a shock in my ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat,” he told French newspapers The Latest News from Alsace (DNA).

The article shows an image of the supposed space rock, which is black and has sharp edges. But it is in these pictures that the first cracks in the explanation meteorite appear.

Observatoire de Paris astronomer Jeremie Vaubaillon explained that the clearly delineated rock was not from outer space. “Image CLEARLY shows it’s NOT a meteorite!” Vaubaillon told him Space.com through emailThursday (20/7/2023).

The rock has too many angles to be a meteorite. It should be borne in mind that while the meteorite is floating in the atmosphere, the rock melts earlier due to the superheated plasma around it.

“Imagine an ice cube melting: There aren’t any corner pieces left in a flash. Well, the same thing happens to meteorites when they pass through the atmosphere,” said Vaubaillon again.

The stone also has a bubbly and irregular surface. This is common in volcanic rock which are bubbles of congealed lava as molten rock cools rapidly.

By contrast, space rocks that pass through Earth’s atmosphere tend to have smooth surfaces due to the heat they experience and the melting they cause, as Vaubaillon noted.

François Colas, an astronomer with the sky surveillance network Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network (FRIPON), explained to the French astronomy publication Ciel & Espace, that when a meteorite falls from the sky, it tends to arrive at the surface at about 186 mph (300 kilometers per O’clock).

So if the 6th of July rock was a meteorite, it should have damaged the roof when it hit it. “But that didn’t happen in this case,” Colas said.

Additionally, FRIPON also monitored the skies over France for meteor-caused flashes, but none were detected in the area on 6 July. If it is a space rock, the object will also be missed by other sky watchers.

“Such an object reaches magnitude -15 (with a minus prefix indicating a very bright object above Earth); it did not go unnoticed. In this season, there are also many amateur astronomers observing; they will report such incidents,” Cola explained.

Vaubaillon explains how unlikely it is for someone to be hit by a meteorite that falls to Earth. Additionally, Earth is a very large target for space rocks, and about 71 percent of its surface is ocean.

“The surface of the earth is very large compared to the size of a human. Two-thirds of meteorite falls end up in the ocean, and most of the rest end up in fields, forests, deserts, etc., said Vaubaillon.

2023-07-20 06:55:37
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