Quote:
Originally Posted by
UNOE 
I'm very sure the thing that seems like a explosion is just the meteor breaking thru the atmosphere or moving thru the air. The delay is just because the speed of sound.
This is why most of the damage is just broken glass. When I saw a aircraft breaking the speed of sound ten years ago. I remember seeing the plexi windows vibrate on the building I was standing next too, I thought they where going to break.
Yes.
This concept seems really hard for some people to understand.
1. Meteor enters Earth atmosphere at 40,000 MPH. It is used to traveling in space (an airless vacuum). It hit's the atmosphere so fast that it (the air particles) are like a brick wall to the meteor. So meteor hits a "brick wall" and...
2. Meteor explodes into smaller chunks and so on until the speed / mass of the chunk(s) are low enough to NOT cause an explosion. Each explosion causes a "boom" noise due to the explosion; the first one is really loud and sends out a blast wave of air which blows out the windows. The next explosions are less and less noisy and turbulent.
3. This chain occurs REALLY fast and so the boom(s) are really quick together. A few chunks may be large enough to make a crater hole. They are traveling so fast that they can create a crater much larger than themselves due to the energy from speed. The main crater hole found was only 6ft. wide so that means the chunk was a lot less smaller. Most of all the chunks burned up before hitting ground.
4. The "boom" effect is delayed from the explosion because light travels much faster than sound. The light from the event is relatively so close that you see it "instantly". Sound travels slower and you hear the event in "seconds", not "instantly". The difference in time creates a delay effect.
5. Chunks of shadow you see spewing out from the meteor in the videos are... guess what... chunks of the meteor.
6. As cool as it would be, an Earth missile travels much, much slower than the meteor was going. There was not enough time for anyone on Earth to detect it even entering Earth, due to it being relatively tiny and traveling so fast.
Edited by kennyparker1337 - 2/18/13 at 12:30am
