Large meteor possibly hits in Arizona

If its a meteor you should look for some pieces, their worth a lot of money.

a reply to: nOraKat

I was just about too say -


How many will be making there way for a hunt for rock that is worth mega $$$$$

a reply to: mthgs602

Cool find... taken from Southern central Tucson looking North. The mountains are the Santa Catalina mnts... and one could narrow the path down to a few hundred yards from that. The remains are likely on the plains (in Spain?) beyond. It is surprisingly close and at $10,000 per oz (approx) those rocks are lucrative!

Too bad there are (at least) fifty or so nut cases that have already triangulated and are scouring the desert hills for it, but I've always had "meteorite hunter" as my fall back position when my lucrative ATS career ends.

eta: although at 111 degrees in the shade, lately, they can have the money!

I am suprise after doing a ATS search for causes of meteor explosions that there is little speculation on why this happens. And a youtube search revealed nothing. But I did find an article that didn't line up with why I assumed meteors exploded. I thought the friction generated heat that caused expansion.

But the article I found says that the diameter of the meteor increases air resistance to the point that it breaks the compressive strength of the material the meteor is made of.

Here is the article I found.

www.wired.com...

Some of these Ruskeor pieces are colored blue. These are the pieces that interact with the air. So, the air pushes on these front pieces to slow them down, but how does the rest of the rock slow down? Simple, the blue pieces push on the other pieces. So, in a way, this rock is being crushed. Crushed because the air resistance force pushes on the front, but not the rest of the rock. How hard would you have to push on a material to get it to break? This is what’s called the compressive strength. Clearly, a wider material will take more force, so the compressive strength is measured in Newtons per square meter. Really, it’s the maximum pressure the material can take before breaking. Back to Ruskeor. Let’s say I take the drag force from above and this is evenly distributed over the cross sectional area of the rock (which it wouldn’t be). In that case, I can calculate the pressure on the rock due to the air.

a reply to: Miracula2
That's right, it's the compression - not the friction - that causes a meteoroid burn up in the atmosphere, sometime with explosive and disintegrating consequences.

As a meteoroid "dives" into the Earth's atmosphere, it starts pushing air molecules in front of it. The meteoroid is going so fast that air molecules have no time to move out of the way, so they ram into the next molecules on the way, and into even more molecules on the way. The resulting pressure gets so high that those molecules get extremely hot and turn into hot plasma that's hotter than the surface of the Sun.

originally posted by: wildespace
a reply to: Miracula2
The resulting pressure gets so high that those molecules get extremely hot and turn into hot plasma that's hotter than the surface of the Sun.

Oh! More useful info. The plasma thing. The article didn't mention that despite its good info. I don't think he mentioned that, but it sure makes sense as to the secondary reaction of the compression I guess is the formation of the plasma.

a reply to: Miracula2

I started thinking some more on this plasma thing. If it's that the sun. And the boiling point of an iron or nickel meteorite is half the temperature of sun's surface and the plasma is hotter than the sun then the meteorite could be boiled or vaporized.

I am wondering which happens first. Does the meteorite get crushed by the compression forces or does the plasma vaporize it first. Or do these two forces work together?