Apr 112022
 

An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal

It was small, only a foot and a half in diameter or so. But it impacted the atmosphere over Papua new Guinea moving at about 130,000 miles per hour. Sporty! At that speed, one kilogram of rock – or ice, or iron, or whatever – has about 1,688,688,236 Joules of kinetic energy. one kilogram of TNT has 4,184,000 Joules of chemical explosive energy, so that rock is 403 times more powerful than a conventional bomb by mass.

A one kiloton explosion would be produced by 2,481 kilograms of impactor, or about a car and a half.

 Posted by at 4:00 pm