Posted on 10/21/2006 10:18:56 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
BERLIN (Reuters) - A fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday.
Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn, said the fire gutted the cottage and badly burned the man's hands and face in the incident on October 10.
"We sought assistance from Bochum observatory and they noted that at that particular moment the earth was near a field of meteoroid splinter and it could be assumed that particles had entered the atmosphere," he said.
"The particles usually don't reach the surface because they disintegrate in the atmosphere," he added. "But some can make it to the ground. We believe this was a bolide (meteoric fireball) with a size of no more than 10 mm."
10 mm is not even as big as a pea.
It's bigger than many peas, and bigger than some beans. It is wider than a kidney bean although not as long. It is smaller than a musketball. It's about the size of a 180 grain pistol bullet. It is twice the size of my neighbor's dog's brain.
Well, by my reckoning, it's just slightly larger than 1/4".
But is that big enough to destroy a house?
That is not big enough to start a fire in a pile of leaves. A meteorite, iron, about 100 pounds, might start a housefire, although probably not since it would go right through to the basement and into the ground. That is probably the biggest piece they found. Normally, bolides are stone and explode miles up in the air and shower the ground with gravel and dust, and none of it much more than warm. An iron meteorite, though, would not normally explode but would get hot and start melting until it hit the ground in a chunk and probably would go into the ground a couple feet.
Oh, yeah, the volcano was cool.
And I once saw Pat Buchanan walking through an airport.
An act of Zeus, anyway.
It's like the woman who owned and was in the condo when the NY Yankee pitcher's small plane crashed into it a couple of weeks ago. There was a thread that pointed out that it was the same woman who was hit by a street lamp a few years ago when a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon broke free. Someone posted that it was God's way of telling her she really really should move out of Manhattan.
Depends how fast it's moving; although fresh meteorites are generally reported to be (at most) warm to the touch, having a fast-moving rock smash through the roof could cause a house to catch fire (nick a gas line, for example).
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