Something else to worry about: Being hit by a meteor
June 12th, 2009
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People seem to worry a lot about things which are astronomically unlikely to happen to them and which there is very little they can do anything about. Here’s another to add to the list: being hit by a meteor. Yes, a meteor. Small bits of space rock are constantly hitting the earth’s atmosphere. Most burn up in the upper layers of the atmosphere, but a very few survive long enough to make it to the ground – at which point they become meteorites. Even fewer of these happen to impact at a location which is being occupied by a human.
That being said, it is more likely that a given person will be struck by a meteor than the probability that a given photon from a local nuclear reactor will make its way out of the containment building and strike a cell in someone’s body in a manner that causes cancer. Yet people worry about this constantly!
There is one case of this happening and being confirmed:
In 1954, Alabama Housewife Ann Hodges was asleep on her living room couch when a grapefruit sized meteor came through her home’s roof, bounced off the floor and landed on her, leaving a sizable bruise. There’s always been a little bit of dispute about whether this actually constitutes being hit by a meteor, as some have speculated that the item that caused the bruise may have been a piece of debris from her home and not the meteor itself. Also, since the meteor had impacted the ground, it was technically a meteorite. In either case, it was an indirect hit.
Make that two cases, because there’s been a second victim of those damn stones from above and this time there’s no dispute. The meteor was a direct strike out of a blue sky and onto the hand of a German schoolboy. Gerrit Blank was apparently walking to school, minding his own business when he was struck in the hand by a pea-sized meteor, leaving him with a minor injury. and a potentially valuable meteorite.
Meteorites of a similar size and composition to the one that struck Gerrit are fairly common, but nearly all have been collected by meteorite hunters, who scour the ground for past meteorites, using metal detectors or other methods to find the tiny fragments of space material. Meteorites which have a confirmed and witnessed date of reentry are extremely rare.
A teenager was hit by a meteorite travelling at 30,000mph – and lived to tell the tale.
Gerrit Blank was on his way to school when he saw a massive fireball heading straight towards him from the sky.
The white-hot meteorite bounced off the schoolboy’s hand and hit the ground so hard it left a foot-long crater in the tarmac – as well as a three-inch scar on his hand.
Gerrit, 14, said: “At first I just saw a large ball of light and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand.
“Then, a split second after that, there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder.”
“The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards.
“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself in the road.”
Scientists are now studying the pea-sized meteorite, which crashed to Earth in Essen in Germany.
Chemical tests on the rock have now proved it is from outer space.
Ansgar Korte, director of Germany’s Walter Hohmann Observatory, said: “It’s a real meteorite, therefore it is very valuable to collectors and scientists.”
Chances of being struck by a meteorite are around one in 100 million.
Mr Korte said: “Most meteorites don’t actually make it to ground level because they evaporate in the atmosphere.
“Of those that do get through, about six out of every seven of them land in water.”
He was very lucky to have been struck in the hand and not the head, as that could have caused a serious, possibly even fatal, injury. As it is, the impact left Gerrit with an abrasion on his hand that is not very serious. It appears that the meteor just grazed his hand before striking the ground. He may left with a scar, however. The good side of this, in addition to having the best excuse for being late to school in the history of mankind, is that if he ever finds himself in a situation where he is comparing scars and telling stories about them, as in the original Jaws, he’ll be sure to have the winner, hands down.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Culture, Good Science, Misc, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 12th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
That’s crazy. How did it bury itself so deep into the ground and not severely hurt the boy’s hand?
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June 12th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
That kid had a horseshoe right up his a..
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June 12th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Chrystal K. said:
It didn’t impact his hand. It just grazed it.
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June 12th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
DC, I am a new visitor to your blog. I put you on my googleReader, and have enjoyed reading your stuff. I came across your work on a reference from another blog that I can not quite remember…I’m bad about that these days. I actually stole some links without giving you credit…I think it was the windmill ‘toons. Sorry…
If that wasn’t yours, then please disregard the “Sorry!”
I saw this story this morning from Sky News, and found it very interesting. I’m happy to have your insights on how common this is. I was just about to go buy a helmet after reading it…just call me Chicken Little.
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June 12th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
If you’re hit by something from above there is a much much greater chance it will be something from earth than space. I remember hearing of someone being struck by a rock which was thought to be a meteorite but it turned out that it was a terrestrial rock. They were doing construction work nearby and it’s believed that somehow the rock got caught in a machine or something and flung into the air.
I’d bet it’s more likely to be struck from a piece of an airplane breaking off than a meteorite. (Not that that is likely either)
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June 13th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Let me see if I have this clear:
When in space, but not really associated with the earth, it’s a “Small asteroid” or “asteroid fragment”
When it’s on a collision course with earth “meteoroid”
When it is in the earth’s atmosphere “meteor”
And when it hits the ground “meteorite”
Phew. Kinda confusing.
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June 13th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Hmmm…
I can’t do it now, because after this story it would just be too obvious and therefore I must let the fanfair die down. I have a great idea to gain fame and fortune. It involves a self-inflicted injury and a store-bought meteorite.
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June 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am
That last photo, though I know its photoshoppd, is just weird..
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June 15th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I’ve never really understood how they can tell if a rock came from space or from earth. Well, really, the entire earth came from space, so what is the chemical or physical indicator which can prove conclusively that a rock wasn’t formed right here at home?
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June 15th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Chuck said:
Isotopic analysis.
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June 15th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Chuck said:
There are ways of identifying them in the field. Meteorites are sometimes formed largly metallic iron, which doesn’t generally exist on earth. The process of being heated by the entry into the atmosphere leaves them with a distinctive surface.
Conclusive proof that they are not from earth, as Finrod says, can be determined by isotopic analysis. However, not all meteorites that are avaliable have been isotopically analyzed. You can buy small ones in science shops and stuff, and it would be prohibitively expensive if each and every one were analyzed completely. But they share the same characteristics.
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June 17th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Oh man, that Sky report is so full of crap it makes me whine. Like I just did.
Point 1: A pea-sized meteorite would most emphatically not be travelling at 30,000 MPH at ground level. Try 200MPH or thereabouts. It would, basically, be falling – not flying.
Point 2: If something travelling at 30,000 MPH comes *close* to you, welcome to Pink Mist Heights, population: You.
My guess is if he got hit by anything, he got hit by fragments kicked up from the road. Statistically speaking, much likelier. I’m also confused that he heard a bang, then saw a flash.
Either way, it’s a hell of a war-story to have, and I wouldn’t let petty details like “facts” get in the way… then again, I am half Irish.
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June 17th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
MarkHB said:
Oh, it certainly was not traveling at 30,000 mph when it hit him. It would have been traveling that fast when it hit the upper atmosphere.
As for hearing something and then seeing a flash after the sound, no this is not what you’d expect, but it actually has been reported by numerous witnesses to meteor entries – enough to make it possible that its more than selective memory.
There are some explanations for this that have come up, like that the reentry might cause some atmospheric heating or compression that generates sound before the body heats up to the point of incandescence or that there is
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