Meteor fall: A Consistent Threat

Last month on 28 February, 2021, in the Winchcombe area of Gloucestershire, England, a meteor fall was observed as a fireball lit up the sky for a while and disappeared.

Later, local people found a pile of charred stones at the place. When they reported to the authority about it, the experts revealed that the stones contained carbonaceous chondrite. That is a stony material which retains unaltered chemistry from the formation of our Solar System 4.6 billion years ago.

According to the researchers, carbonaceous chondrites are particularly special. They say the materials are essentially the left-over building blocks of our Solar System.

Reports about the Event

As mentioned by BBC quoting to Dr Ashley King from London’s Natural History Museum (NHM), most of the material collected from the meteor fall contains simple organics and amino acids. Likewise, some contain minerals formed by water. So, all the ingredients are there for understanding how you make a habitable planet such as the Earth.

It was 30 years ago researchers had recovered the last space rock or meteoroid fall in the UK in 1991. That had fallen in the village of Glaton near Peterborough.

Hence, scientists felt happy from this event. They say only about 12 hundreds out of approximately 65 thousands meteorites in collections worldwide had eyewitnesses to their fall. And, out of these all, only 51 contained  the carbonaceous chondrite in that scale.

Similar Another Event

On the other hand, NASA has stated that a nearly 10 pounds(4.5kg) weighed meteor had exploded in the US state of Vermont on 7 March,2021. It had released about 440 pounds(200kg) of TNT.

Moreover, the space rock was fragmented producing a violent sound and tremor on the ground of that trajectory. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Meteor watch, the object had the speed of 68 thousands km/h(42 thousands km/h) when it entered into the earth’s atmosphere.

On the basis of eye-witnesses’ account, NASA further stated that the roaming object exploded creating the loud booming sound. Then, it broke into pieces and created a meteor shower.

Before the terrible explosion, people of that place had observed the brightly-lit  meteor in the sky. Thus, the people of New England and Canada, including those of Vermont, had witnessed the event.

Finally,

This and the previous event of England indicate towards the unknown security threats to the inhabitants of the earth. Among such roaming celestial bodies, smaller ones might be exploded and fragmented in the sky before reaching the ground.

And, that happens to them due to the high pressure of the earth’s atmosphere. So they can not harm to the earthly creatures. However, the question, ‘What if a remarkably larger one approaches here?’ is still waiting for an answer.