Last week’s news was exciting: A meteor plunged through the roof of a New Jersey home, was scientifically identified by a nearby college, and the owners expressed relief that no one had been home and thus, there were no injuries.
For readers of this newspaper, even stranger connections may come to mind. For, this is the third such home in our general region to be damaged by a meteor in the past few decades, which we’ve reported on this page. Woodstock may be a special area that attracts interplanetary objects.
But first, quick definitions. A solid chunk that was originally an asteroid or a piece of one, or even a piece of the Moon or Mars blasted away by a larger impact is called a meteoroid as it flies through space. If it reaches and penetrates Earth’s atmosphere so that air friction makes it heat up and glow (or, more accurately, causes the air around it to fluoresce), then it’s termed a meteor or shooting star. In the rare case it survives its passage through the air and lands before turning to dust, it’s called a meteorite. So what struck that roof? Well, it changed from a meteor to a meteorite the moment it made contact. Thus you’d be correct calling it by either name. Of course, once it’s in someone’s hand or in a museum it’s forever a meteorite and there’s no going back.
The previous nearby house impacts happened in Wethersfield, Connecticut on April 8, 1972 and then, incredibly, to another house in that same Kingston-sized town on November 8, 1982. That time I interviewed the owners, Bob and Wanda Donohue, who’d been watching TV in the next room when it happened. Just like in last week’s New Jersey incident, the outer space intruder, a bit larger than a softball, had penetrated the roof and one additional floor before bouncing around and settling.
I’d asked all sorts of questions in 1982. What had they been watching on TV? (Mash.) Did they know what was happening while it unfolded? (No. It had been very loud but they had no idea until firemen arrived and found it under the kitchen table.) What did they do with it? (Donated it to the Yale museum.)
When I was on the Letterman show a decade later, I secreted my own substantial meteorite specimen and plopped it down with a thud on his desk. He was astonished when I told him what it was, before telling viewers the chances that they might observe one that night if they watched the sky. I think meteors create fear mostly through misconceptions. No, they’re not hot when they land. And no, they don’t tend to do much damage.
That’s because our atmosphere dramatically slows them down, and the damage anything can cause varies with the square of its speed. Meaning, velocity is far more influential than an intruder’s weight in terms of its danger. Meteoroids start by entering the top of our atmosphere zooming between 12 and 39 miles a second, an average of around 75,000 mph. That’s enough to destroy anything and scour out a crater. Very massive ones, the size of a building or larger, retain nearly all of that entry speed.
But your garden-variety one- or two-pound meteoroid slows to 250-300 mph by the time it reaches the ground. That’s just enough to make a hole in the roof and then penetrate a layer of sheetrock to enter an upper-story room, but it goes no farther. We’ve seen this exact scenario play out over and over.
Still, it’s a bit odd that our general region keeps getting struck, although in US history there have been 158 documented “falls” – defined as meteors that were witnessed or documented and then the meteorite recovered. Nearly 2,000 worldwide falls are recorded too, like the February 15, 2013 incident in Chelyabinsk, Siberia. There must of course have been many more impacts and tons of metallic or rocky space debris scattered all around our planet. But most would have landed in remote regions or in oceans and thus are unlikely ever to be found.
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