At a speed of 68 thousand kilometers per hour ... a meteor explodes in the sky of Vermont, USA

Residents of the northeastern United States were on a date on Sunday evening, March 7, with a space visitor penetrating the Earth's atmosphere at a tremendous speed, in a stunning light show accompanied by the sounds of explosions as it burned in the atmosphere.

And the specialists in the field of observing these phenomena were able to determine a lot of physical data about the meteorite, which attracted the attention of the media and those interested in these astronomical phenomena.

Fireball penetrates the sky

According to the NASA Meteor Watch, the space object appeared over the northern part of Vermont in the form of a bright fireball at 5:30 pm EST, just before sunset.

The meteor broke through the atmosphere at a high speed of 68,000 kilometers per hour (about 19 kilometers per second).

The same source indicates that the exploding meteorite released through the atmosphere an energy equivalent to that produced by the explosion of 200 kilograms of "TNT", which indicates that the meteorite weighed about 4.5 kilograms and was 15 centimeters in diameter.

A local news station reported - quoting eyewitnesses in different parts of the state - that they heard "a loud boom and a shaking of the bodies" as the meteor passed through the sky, according to the "Livescience" scientific website.

Based on eyewitness accounts, NASA estimated that the fireball first appeared 84 kilometers above Mount Mansfield State forest east of Burlington, the largest city in the state of Vermont, and then It advanced 53 km northeast toward the Canadian border, before disappearing south of Newport.

Watch below surveillance cameras at Burlington International Airport recording the passage of the Vermont meteorite:

Shock wave

According to NASA, the high speed at which the meteor was moving - about 55 times the speed of sound - caused a very strong shock wave, pressure accumulating in front of it and forming a vacuum behind it, and this pressure difference caused the meteorite to break apart into fragments.

The danger of meteorites lies in their high speed, which may reach 30 kilometers per second, according to Bernard Melguen, an astrophysicist at the University of Nantes in France. Colliding with the ground is very strong.

As for the light that shines as it penetrates the atmosphere, it is not caused by its combustion, but by the process of "ionization" of the atoms of the material on its surface when in contact with the oxygen in the air. See him hundreds of kilometers away.

Meteorites break apart as a result of atmospheric contact while they are moving at high speed (NASA)

Sizes and falls varied

Scientists estimate the total mass of rocks that enter the Earth's atmosphere annually between 100 and 200 thousand tons, and tiny dust particles called micrometeors make up more than 90% of them, and they found that the number of meteorites that reach the earth varies according to the size, so the larger the size, the collision Earth is more scarce.

Tons of tiny meteorites strike the Earth every day, and every 30 seconds a meteor - about one millimeter in diameter - penetrates the atmosphere, and its friction with the air as a result of its high speed generates enough heat to dissolve or vaporize it completely, while those over two centimeters in size may survive complete combustion , And you reach the surface of the earth.

As for the stones whose size is similar to the size of the meteorite that was seen last Sunday in the sky of the northeast of the United States, a few dozen of them fall to the ground annually, but many of them fall in remote places such as the oceans or during daylight hours.

The rate at which meteorites fall on Earth varies according to their size (pixabay)

While meteorites greater than one kilometer in diameter fall only once every million years on average, and this is fortunate, because they produce effects that would be catastrophic on the planet.

If you want to see a show in the sky like the one over Vermont you need only a little attention to what happens in space at night, it might just happen that a bright meteor passes through the sky.