Saturday, April 5, 2014

Skydiver Almost Struck by Meteorite


13 comments:

john said...

If you're not a denier are you a nier?

Call me skeptical at least.

Synova said...

It should be possible to verify that the meteorite expert is who it says he is. I didn't do that, but it seems to me that they said all the right sorts of things. If it's a breccia, which is maybe a bit unlikely, or at least hard to tell from a couple of blurry dark dots, then it's from a large enough body to have gone through differentiation... ie, the moon, Mars, Vesta, Ceres... or a previous body that's been broken up that we don't know about. Rocky meteorites can be angular like that. The fusion crust is thin, and if the rock breaks up might be only on part of it.

I'd always thought that meteors "burned up"... that they were melted and hot, but it's not true. They also seem to sometimes fall rather gently by the time they hit the ground, not always, but often enough.

It's potentially an *extremely* valuable rock. Chondrites and rocky meteorites are the most common, but they weather and break apart and are lost very quickly. Metalic meteorites are rare, but they last forever, so we find lots more of them that are very old.

Synova said...

Metallic, Oy.

john said...

I think the rock was chucked from the plane, as a joke I hope.

bagoh20 said...

Riiiiiight.

What are the odd that a guy skydiving would be recording video at just that vary rare time of this event. (notice I didn't say "filming" or "videotaping" because that's how hip I am.)

Anyway, I call bullshit, but I do that for almost all claims by humans and especially foreigners.

Maybe this guy has video of flight 370 being towed to the moon by Chinese unicorns on interplanetary skateboards.

bagoh20 said...

Besides, that thing wasn't even going terminal velocity. That's not possible.

Synova said...

For what it's worth, Hans Erik Foss Amundsen seems to be real, PhD, lots of publications, possibly into some sort of private space business at this point so likely a publicity hog, but that doesn't mean he's lying... Morten Bilet is really a meteorite expert and searches on his name take you to meteorite science sites.

Synova said...

Granted... Hans Erik is bullsh*tting about it coming from the asteroid belt.

bagoh20 said...

The odds are astronomical that a camera would be at that spot at that time with a skydiver unless you need a compelling story. How can a rock be going that slow unless it was hollow? Multiply the odds of any meteor being there by the also astronomical odds of it being one going very slowly and not burning up. I play the lottery sometimes, but even I won't buy odds that slim.

Rabel said...

There's a second object at 35 seconds on the lower left and an earlier shiny spotting at 21.

I want to believe.

Synova said...

Meteorites don't burn up all the way down.

They land still frozen. Often.

The fusion crust on a rocky meteorite is usually really thin. They aren't little burning lumps of stuff.

Getting it on camera is unbelievable (but then again, people *do* win the lottery) but pretty much everything else is making the right sorts of sounds.

Rabel said...

It could have been one of Florida's 3-point attempts.

My sympathy to Icepick. I was pulling for the Gators.

Synova said...

Meteorites have fallen on people's houses, come through the roof and into the living room while they're standing right there... hit their car... etc.