Originally posted by smurfy
But still, a solid piece of rock this size and mass, is not a bit of gravel, more like 20 tonnes in weight alone. Add the speed, and minus any burnup,
it would still be a considerable force.
You are quite correct that an 8m rock would have considerable energy, but even that is relatively small in the great scheme of things, although it
might seem big to you and me. Of course, what happens will depend on various factors, not least of which are speed, size and angle of entry, but also
composition/density also play a huge part.
Excepting the larger sized iron/nickel objects (which are rare), even the harder denser rocky objects don't stand much chance against our atmosphere,
which is surprisingly good at slowing down huge objects and absorbing massive amounts of energy.
Lets look at an example. If you go to
Impact Earth and enter in a couple of numbers, It'll calculate the
effects of your object.
I used 16 meters to show that even objects of double the size we are talking about here have a hard time doing any damage on the ground.The only other
parameters I tweaked were the speed, which I upped to 20 km/s (which is a mid-range value for an asteroid), and I set the material density to "dense
rock".
These are the resulting effects that it calculated:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 56600 meters = 186000 ft
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 24300 meters = 79800 ft.
The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 13.6 km/s = 8.45 miles/s.
The energy of the airburst is 6.91 x 10^14 Joules = 0.16 x 10^0 MegaTons.
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
There is some good info on the subject in the
AMS fireball FAQ
12. How fast are meteorites traveling when they reach the ground?
Meteoroids enter the earth’s atmosphere at very high speeds, ranging from 11 km/sec to 72 km/sec (25,000 mph to 160,000 mph). However, similar to
firing a bullet into water, the meteoroid will rapidly decelerate as it penetrates into increasingly denser portions of the atmosphere. This is
especially true in the lower layers, since 90 % of the earth’s atmospheric mass lies below 12 km (7 miles / 39,000 ft) of height.
At the same time, the meteoroid will also rapidly lose mass due to ablation. In this process, the outer layer of the meteoroid is continuously
vaporized and stripped away due to high speed collision with air molecules. Particles from dust size to a few kilograms mass are usually completely
consumed in the atmosphere.
Due to atmospheric drag, most meteorites, ranging from a few kilograms up to about 8 tons (7,000 kg), will lose all of their cosmic velocity while
still several miles up. At that point, called the retardation point, the meteorite begins to accelerate again, under the influence of the Earth’s
gravity, at the familiar 9.8 meters per second squared. The meteorite then quickly reaches its terminal velocity of 200 to 400 miles per hour (90 to
180 meters per second). The terminal velocity occurs at the point where the acceleration due to gravity is exactly offset by the deceleration due to
atmospheric drag.
Meteoroids of more than about 10 tons (9,000 kg) will retain a portion of their original speed, or cosmic velocity, all the way to the surface. A
10-ton meteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere perpendicular to the surface will retain about 6% of its cosmic velocity on arrival at the surface.
For example, if the meteoroid started at 25 miles per second (40 km/s) it would (if it survived its atmospheric passage intact) arrive at the surface
still moving at 1.5 miles per second (2.4 km/s), packing (after considerable mass loss due to ablation) some 13 gigajoules of kinetic energy.
On the very large end of the scale, a meteoroid of 1000 tons (9 x 10^5 kg) would retain about 70% of its cosmic velocity, and bodies of over 100,000
tons or so will cut through the atmosphere as if it were not even there. Luckily, such events are extraordinarily rare.
We get hit by meter sized rocks thousands of times a day probably, but every time you double that diameter, the mass of the object increases
exponentially, and so does the frequency at which we encounter them. So by the time we get into the range at which these things can cause serious
localized damage (100 meters+), they are rare enough that Earth only encounters objects of that size every few hundred years.
Earth makes a small target too, so when you hear about a close approach being "only" 1 LD away, that's actually not that close. If Earth is the
size of a pin head, then the distance to the moon would be something like 500 meters. On that scale a large asteroid would be microscopic, and the
chances of two tiny particles interacting on this scale are also microscopic.
So to sum up, although
in theory we could get hit by something fairly big (big enough to cause harm to people), the odds are stacked in favour
of us not being hit any time in the near future.