Young Gerrit Blank certainly has a hot story to tell his mates…

The 14-year-old was hit by a meteorite which crashed to earth in a ball of flames at 30,000mph.

It bounced off his hand and left a foot-wide smouldering crater in the tarmac. Gerrit was on his way to school when he spotted the fireball hurtling towards him out of the sky.

He said: “I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. A split second later there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder.

“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road.

“I thought the meteor struck me, but it could also be a result from the heat as it went by me,” he said.

After the intial shock, Blank looked at the glowing rock the left a sizable crater in Brakeler Wald Street. He then took the iced tea from his school lunch and doused his glowing pebble and took it to school with him.

“At school, I told the story. My classmates believed me,” he said. His parents didn’t get to hear the story until the end of the school day.

Once home, Blank, who plans to focus his studies in science, tested the round, black object and already found some confirmation the pebble is from outer space: like many meteorites, the rock is magnetic.

“I thought the meteor struck me, but it could also be a result from the heat as it went by me,” he said.

Originally posted by and14263
reply to post by NovusOrdoMundi

---

“I thought the meteor struck me, but it could also be a result from the heat as it went by me,” he said.

He thinks it possibly didn't hit him.

During the final free-fall portion of their flight, meteorites undergo very little frictional heating, and probably reach the ground at only slightly above ambient temperature." However, they point out that there really aren't many reports, and those we have are often "prone to hearsay".

csep10.phys.utk.edu... The average velocity of meteoroids entering our atmosphere is 10-70 km/second. The smaller ones that survive the trip to the Earth's surface are quickly slowed by atmospheric friction to speeds of a few hundred kilometers per hour, and so hit the Earth with no more speed than if they had been dropped from a tall building.