Meteor blast over Bering Sea was 10 times size of Hiroshima
Source: The Guardian
Meteor blast over Bering Sea was 10 times size of Hiroshima
Fireball over Kamchatka peninsula in December went largely unnoticed at the time
Ian Sample Science editor
Mon 18 Mar 2019 12.19 GMT
A meteor explosion over the Bering Sea late last year unleashed 10 times as much energy as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, scientists have revealed.
The fireball tore across the sky off Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula on 18 December and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT. It was the largest air blast since another meteor hurtled into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s south-west, six years ago, and the second largest in the past 30 years.
Unlike the Chelyabinsk meteor, which was captured on CCTV, mobile phones and car dashboard cameras, the December arrival from outer space went largely unnoticed at the time because it exploded in such a remote location.
Nasa received information about the blast from the US air force after military satellites detected visible and infrared light from the fireball in December. Lindley Johnson, a planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News that blasts of this size were expected only two or three times a century.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/18/meteor-blast-over-bering-sea-was-10-times-size-of-hiroshima