Chelyabinsk Meteor Shockwave 2/15/2013

TravelinTom

Was today's Chelyabinsk meteor destruction from an accelerated, focused "superboom" or a sonic boom? I assume it was not an explosion boom. I am trying to understand if the boom destruction radiated from central point or traveled with the meteor as an aircraft's sonic boom continually travels with the airplane. Neither do I understand if the two types of booms would be mutually exclusive and, if not, could there be two audible booms? I am not a physics guy. Have fun with incomprehensible calculations if it interests you but please try to phrase a simple answer for this dummy. Thank you.

Chronos

The meteorite was probably largely composed of iron allowing it penetrate relatively deep into earths atmosphere before exploding. Any supersonic body produces a sonic boom, but, that component was much less energetic than the shock wave from the explosion. It was probably a miniature version of the tungaska event.

94JZA80

i agree with the above statement. that said, i don't think the shock wave from the explosion itself radiates from the blast location nearly as far as the sonic boom does. most of the damage was due to broken glass, and car alarms went off everywhere. that sounds more to me like the reverberation of a massive sonic boom than it does damage done by the explosion itself.

i live in Sarasota on the west coast of FL, over 150 miles from the Space Shuttle's landing strip at Cape Canaveral. while none of the sonic booms caused by the shuttle upon atmospheric reentry shattered windows in my neighborhood, they've always been clearly audible from such a distance (maybe more or less, depending on where in the atmosphere the shuttle reenters), and i could always "feel" it in addition to hearing it. a quick google search revealed that scientists believe this object to have been approx. 50 feet in diameter and weighed approx. 7,700 tons (source is The Christian Science Monitor believe it or not LOL). its reentry speed was estimated at 19 mi/s, or ~68,000 mi/h (source is Digital Monitor). now considering 1) its cross section along its axis of motion is much larger than the shuttle's, 2) its almost certainly much less aerodynamic than the shuttle, and 3) its reentry speed was approx. 4 times faster than that of the shuttle's reentry speed, i can see how its sonic boom might be that much louder, energetic, and far-reaching than that of the shuttle's sonic boom upon reentry.

now the blast supposedly released an amount of energy equivalent to a 300-500 kiloton nuclear weapon (source is The Christian Science Monitor), which is approx. 19 to 31 times as powerful as the 16-kiloton warhead that was dropped on Hiroshima in WWII...a large margin of error, i know. but if it exploded at an estimated altitude of 12-15 miles above the earth's surface (source is The Christian Science Monitor), and knowing that the Hiroshima bomb's blast radius was only ~1 mile, and assuming blast radius does not scale linearly w/ energy output, then i'm not so confident that the shock wave caused by the explosion itself (as evidenced by a blast radius) even reached the ground.

granted this is speculation...what do you think?

mitchell porter

My theory is that the Chelyabinsk "meteor" was an old Russian military satellite being retired under cover of the passing asteroid, deliberately directed at the Chelyabinsk area so that local military teams could go out and rapidly collect the debris. I hope to see some discussion of whether the explosion and shockwave could be consistent with such a hypothesis.

edit: Since the explosion was so big, it might be necessary to suppose a space weapon system with an actual bomb on board.

russ_watters

We don't do conspiracy theory/crackpottery here, mitchell. There is no evidence whatsoever of anything more unusual than a once-a-century meteor explosion - and satellites don't explode with atomic bomb force.

Anyway, It wasn't clear to me but it sounds like the primary blast was from the meteor exploding. I was surprised by the way it looked, but having seen too many movies I suppose I was expecting a stationary fireball. If the meteor is moving 30,000 mph, the fireball is also moving at 30,000 mph and looks like a streak instead of a ball.

And incidentally, the shock wave from the explosion would combine with the shock wave from the sonic boom. They are both, after all, emanating from the same place and traveling at the same speed.

94JZA80

indeed...i hadn't thought about the fact the both shocks were traveling at the same speed. still, the fact that the energy from the explosion itself probably emanated only a relatively short distance from the epicenter, and my own personal experience of hearing the shuttle's sonic boom upon atmospheric reentry on numerous occasions from much greater distances than the typical blast radius of a "small" nuclear weapon leads me to hypothesize that most of the damage was caused by the sonic boom (even if the explosion itself released much more energy than the sonic boom carried with it, albeit in a much more confined space).

glappkaeft

Much like with the big bang the word "explosion" is missleading. The asteroid didn't explode, it broke up. By breaking up it presented many more fragments to the atmosphere with a much higher total surface area. That in turn generates more/stronger shockwaves than before.

jimgraber

The meteor is thought to be rock, not iron. People "upstream" probably heard both the sonic boom and the explosion at different times. Also different "loudness".

sanman

What were those secondary explosions? Were these perhaps multiple sonic booms produced by fragments?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0cRHsApzt8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_oWCQLyt3Q



Also, I wonder if there were any aircraft in the vicinity when this happened, and if so, how would they have been affected?

Scientists are saying this was a 30-Hiroshima blast.

Dotini

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=pXT_B4kx6YA

In this video, a bright flash is seen by several cameras; at ~9 seconds into the first, and ~40 seconds for another view.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

sanman

This one provides a pretty decent view of the flash too, from an opposite angle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6J2iniSGKI


I'd read that this object came in on an Earth-grazing trajectory. What would have happened if it was coming in on a surface-normal trajectory? Would it have impacted the ground?

Bandersnatch

No it wouldn't.
Check this handy impact calculator to get a feel for various angles, velocities etc.,:
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

RobinSky

Thank you, I also had the same question regarding this.

sanman

Hey, that was pretty cool. I was disappointed that I didn't get to see anything go splat, however.

Maybe that could be a good idea for an app.

Zorwell

Why did the meteor explode? What specifically caused the fireball (the abrupt increase in brightness) for example? That is, what is the physics behind such a fireball versus one that just ablates and burns down to nothing? Meteors are made up of materials were normally consider explosive, so what produces the energy we see in such a fireball? What's the mechanism? Did the material of the meteor vaporize and the constituents burn?

mfb

The energy is just the kinetic energy of the meteor. Space shuttles have to fight with that, too, and leave a similar (but much smaller) trace. Air drag is so extreme that it can break the object (if you hit a stone hard enough with anything, it will break - even if it is a single, massive block).

Zorwell

Of course it's the kinetic energy but what specifically causes the fireball as opposed to the meteor just ablating down to nothing? Even if the meteor breaks up that doesn't mean that it will become a fireball. What the videos showed was an abrupt increase in the brightness of the fireball--what produced that light? Was it photons produced by breaking of the molecular bonds of many small particles of the meteor? Was it rapid combustion of the atomized material of the meteor? Or was it some other process?

Kinetic energy + the material of the meteor are the inputs and the light (among others) is the output: what is the physical process that takes those inputs and produces that output?