Posted on 08/27/2002 11:50:09 AM PDT by blam
Tuesday, 27 August, 2002, 12:27 GMT 13:27 UK
'Meteorite' hits girl
Siobhan Cowton: "I saw it fall from above roof height"
The odds against being hit by a meteorite are billions to one - but a teenager in North Yorkshire may have had one land on her foot. Siobhan Cowton, 14, was getting into the family car outside her Northallerton home at 1030 BST on Thursday when a stone fell on her from the sky.
This does not happen very often in Northallerton
Siobhan Cowton
Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel.
The family now plan to have the stone analysed by scientists at Durham University.
"I saw it fall from above roof height," Siobhan told BBC News Online.
"It looked very unusual, with a bubbled surface and tiny indentations like volcanic lava.
'Shiny'
"It was shiny on one side and looked rusty as if it contained iron.
"I've seen shooting stars before - but nothing like this. This does not happen very often in Northallerton."
Mr Cowton, 45, told BBC News Online he would take the stone to be analysed himself.
The stone may have come from Mars
"It is not going to leave my sight because it is a very rare find," he said.
"It is worth a lot to Siobhan.
"We will have it mounted in a glass presentation case so she can keep it for the rest of her life.
"After all it is not every day you get hit by a meteorite.
"The odds of winning the Lottery are better."
The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University.
"It could be billions of years old and come from the earliest formation of the solar system," he told the Daily Mail newspaper.
Most meteors are between five and 60 centimetres (1.95 in and 1 ft 11.5 in) long, according to Durham University physical geography lecturer Dr Ben Horton.
"Sometimes they have shallow depressions and cavities," he said.
Even with a mere rock/stone that size, I could overhand throw that baby onto someone's foot, and I guarantee, it's going to ruin their day. I have a pretty good arm, pitched for 5 years as a youngin, but I am no meteor hurler...
I know that was pseudobabble - I wasn't citing that as an accurate source. I just mentioned how the notion of a meteorite "hitting" one person brought that sequence to mind.
Still, I would think that something that dropped from orbit and survived to reach the ground would have one of two things happen: A) the speed would be such that it would do bodily injury to the person hit, or B) the heat from said object would do bodily injury to the person hit.
I'm not quite that dense! (at least to people other than my wife...)
Funny that you should mention density, because it's important. An object falling from orbit has to get through several miles of atmosphere. That passage through atmosphere involves resistance to its motion; the resistance is a function of the object's speed, shape, size, surface characteristics, and the density and viscosity of the atmosphere. The deceleration of the object is a function of the object's own mass, and the force of resistance applied to it by the atmosphere. F=M*a, remember? In the case of a meteor, none of those quantities is a constant. The passage through atmosphere initially generates intense heat, which burns, melts, or ablates material from the meteor. If it's small enough, it will "burn up" before hitting the ground. A larger object will be decelerated until it reaches its "terminal velocity", at which its weight equals the resistive force from the atmosphere. For an object the size shown in the girl's picture, that could be in the 30-40 mph range. A much larger object will strike the ground before being decelerated to its terminal velocity, producing results like Meteor Crater in Arizona.
Oh, wait.
That only applies to American capitalists.
Nevermind.
Oh sure, what world are they living in?They will be made an offer they can't refuse and they'll forget it ever occurred.I bet they've already been inundated with requests and demands.They will see how the world really works in no short time.LOL
There's always that girl that took the family car out for a spin and had a quarter panel destroyed by a meteorite.
Or that woman that was blown out of bed by one crashing through her roof.
The only known person to be hit by man-made space junk was a woman too.
Any reason to believe that there is a pattern developing???
Or is it just that females are gawndurn magnetically attractive?
Not if it small and not very dense. Even gun bullets slow down over the distance. You guys forget about the resistence of the air.
Fair enough.
This lady got hit by an 8.5lb iron meteorite, in 1954. It passed through the roof of her house, first. Big time owie.
RightWhale can testify that you don't want to get me started on this. lol (This is one of my favorites, being a catastrophist and such)
Yup. That's the Alabama woman I was talking about.
Yes, or worse. A direct hit even by a small metorite should cause great trauma.
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