Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Asteroid hit the atmosphere and cause explosions in Indonesia


It's 11 o'clock in the morning and suddenly heard an explosion in the sky. A trail of smoke is marked on the blue background of a cloudless day. A bright object falls. Is it a bird? A plane that falls apart? Superman?

Not so. In Indonesia, an asteroid exploded above the atmosphere, causing fear among the inhabitants of Bone in South Sulawesi.

NASA confirmed a report that a meteorite was between 5 and 10 meters in diameter, crashed into the Earth's atmosphere at about 65,000 mph.

The asteroid exploded with a power of 50 kilotons, three times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb, but as exploded to more than 15 miles high, not damaged, and the piece that survived the impact ended somewhere near the coast (latitude 4.5 South 120 East).

NASA added that such impacts can be expected once between 2 and 12 years on average (though I have lived more than that and do not remember seeing anything like that before). Normally such asteroids do not cause damage, because to effectively impact the Earth, the object should have a diameter of about 25 meters. And if that happens in 2012, at least we'll have Bruce Willis on the planet.

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