Why Explosion Occurs At Meteor Fall?

California - On Friday morning, residents of Chelyabinsk Russia were struck by a giant fireball that shot out of the sky. The explosion, caused by a small meteorite entering the atmosphere, hundreds of people were reported injured and bath "puff" that makes glass-window glass is broken.

Why meteors explode? Asteroids are chunks of rock only, so what makes them so explosive? Only one answer to this question: speed.

Kinetic energy, or energy of motion, of the asteroid that 'speeding' down to Earth so big. Russian Meteor enters the atmosphere at 64,374 miles per hour, said Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteor Unit Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama said in a press conference.

"It's faster than chunks of asteroid or comet which caused the Tunguska event in 1908 is estimated to have entered the atmosphere at a speed of about 53,913 km / h," he said. Events more than a century ago is causing severe damage in Siberia.


Large meteor explosion does not happen every day, especially in populated areas, but it can not be avoided. Meteors size entering the atmosphere every few years, said Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico are studying the meteor impact.


The shock waves that cause the glass shattering as it did in Russia, he said, is the interaction of asteroids with the atmosphere that makes it hot. "It's like TNT with more energy," said Boslough.