Scientists find meteor debris in Canada

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University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley poses with a fragment of a meteorite in a small pond near Lloydminster, Sask., Canada Friday, Nov. 28, 2008. Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month. University of Calgary scientist Alan Hildebrand and Milley found several meteor fragments near the Battle River along the rural Alberta-Saskatchewan border, near the city of Lloydminster late Thursday. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Geoff Howe)

(AP) -- Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month.

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• zevkirsh - Nov 29, 2008
  • Rank: 4 / 5 (1)
  the largest nuke ever tested had 50,000 kilotons of energy. hows that . tzar bomba...the russians.
  id like to see someone do a kiloton graph of kilotons of tnt energy being a function of a meteors speed x and weight y.
  
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• gopher65 - Nov 29, 2008
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (4)
  zevkirsh: assuming that the speed is low enough to be non-relativistic, you can just use KE=0.5mv^2 to get the kinetic energy released, and then convert it to kilotons. (That assumes that the meteor impacts the ground, and that Earth doesn't have an atmosphere. Spherical Cow In A Vacuum, I know.)
  
  The difference in speeds between the two objects is of course of far greater concern than mass (because velocity is squared), but impact speeds have a fairly narrow range, and the total energy difference caused by speed only varies by maybe a factor of 16 (I'm thinking 10km/s to 40km/s).
  
  Of course a factor of 16 sounds like a lot, and it is, but the point is that any given meteor, no matter its mass, will probably fall somewhere inside that speed range.
  
  Since velocity is relatively constant across the whole range of meteors, you can safely ignore that for a rough graph, and only concern yourself with mass. Well, mass increases linearly in that equation, so your graph of impact energy will be a straight line, where impact energy is directly proportionate to the mass of the meteor.
  
  A 10 kilogram object will release 10 times more energy than a 1 kilogram object, a 100 kilogram object will release 100 times more energy than a 1 kilogram object, and so on.
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• gopher65 - Nov 29, 2008
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  Just looked it up, and the average velocity is between 10km/s and 70km/s. So that would mean that average impact energy for any given mass would vary by about a factor of 50. Those are some large error bars;).
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• Star_Gazer - Nov 29, 2008
  • Rank: 2.5 / 5 (4)
  She's cute!
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• DGBEACH - Nov 30, 2008
  • Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
  Don't let the winter-garb fool you Star Gazer, you never really know what's "under there", as 30 million Canadians will undoubtedly confirm (okay maybe just the 15 million male ones anyways)...we go through the same shock every spring once the tuques and mittens come off...'though sometimes you do get a pleasant surprise -:)
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• Doug_Huffman - Nov 30, 2008
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  The Chicxulub bolide had 4 x 10^23 J ` 100 teratons TNT equivalent, 10^14
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