by Have you ever wondered what a meteorite hitting Earth sounds like?
Last July, Joe Velaidum and Laura Kelly, residents of Prince Edward Island, Canada, returned home from walking their dogs to find a pile of rubble outside their home The national post office and the Canadian Press.
“We had no idea what it was,” Velaidum said The national post office.
When they checked their doorbell camera, a video showed a cloud of dust created by the impact of what appeared to be a medium-sized rock, accompanied by the sound of it shattering.
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The images also showed that Velaidum was standing exactly where the meteorite had landed just a few minutes earlier.
“I never stop at this point,” Velaidum said The national post office. “And in hindsight, if I had stayed in that spot for just two minutes longer, I would have been hit by that meteorite.”
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Kelly’s father, who lived nearby, was more certain than anyone else that the object was a meteorite. After the family watched the video, Kelly’s father got a powerful magnet and collected boulders for an expert to examine.
Chris Herd, curator of the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection, later confirmed that it was indeed a meteorite. Specifically, he said, it was a “common chondrite,” the most common type of meteorite.
Still, Herd told The Canadian Press, “It’s remarkable because you’ve never really heard it before.” He added that this was probably “the first time we’ve recorded a recorded meteorite impact on the Earth’s surface with sound.” .”
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As for the space rock itself, Herd told the National Post that “it comes from the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.”
“So a fragment of an asteroid broke off at some point – it could have been millions of years ago – orbited the sun and then crossed Earth’s orbit in the late afternoon Atlantic time on July 25 last year,” he continued.
Herd added that the meteorite, which likely weighed about a kilogram, was traveling at about 50 times the speed of sound, or 60,000 kilometers per hour, when it first entered the atmosphere. But by the time it reached the Velaidum approach, its speed had dropped to about 200 kilometers per hour and about 90% of its material would have burned.
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As for Velaidum, he told the Canadian Press that what happened was a reminder that “the lives we lead are just a small part of this heavenly drama that is so much bigger than we ever imagined.” “I can imagine.”
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