41–50 of 105 posts
"230 tons of TNT" I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"? The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
"230 tons of TNT" I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"? The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.
Probably just a UFO pickup gone bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSY4fEEg4j0
Earlier quoted context omitted.
jojobas and NASA's statements aren't contradictory. NASA states: "the fragmentation of the fireball unleashes large amounts of energy, which also generates a pressure wave that can produce a very loud boom, even shaking houses." Fragmentation of a fireball, whilst not explosive itself (the particles needn't diverge at a supersonic relative velocity) are nonetheless part of a supersonic / hypersonic particle field rel…
Your statement is not supported by, and is somewhat at odds with, physics. As described in this source, observed terminal brightening/"burst" of a bolide is tied to the body's material behavior (fragmentation, rapid lateral expansion, ablation), and not to a free-standing "deceleration shockwave" that exists independently of the body breaking up. https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2001ESASP.495..491R
I didn't state that the shockwave is independent of whether or not the body breaks up, I wrote, emphasised, "Expanding the diameter of that particle field will increase the size of the resultant shockwave, whether the particle separation itself is "explosive" or not."
Which your article (partially read, sorry, incredibly shitty reader) largely substantiates, largely in the itemised list in section 2.2. Pancaking of a bolide through fragmentation increases frontal area, has multiple points of mass interacting with the atmosphere over a larger area and with less mass at each point, and the (undiscussed) light-emission mechanism which itself largely derives from compressive heating and ionisation of the atmosphere (rather than friction against the atmosphere or heating of bolide particles themselves). Increasing the number, and surface areas, of particles increases the region and intensity of this effect.
As your source discusses, most fragmentation is a result of mechanical rather than thermal forcing of the bolide.
"230 tons of TNT" I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"? The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.
0.00006 times the speed of light. Damn.
The day was somewhat stormy. I was in my kitchen in my north-suburban-Boston house, when I suddenly heard a BOOM. I thought it was a very large branch falling on my house, so I ran outside to check out the roof. Saw nothing, and only later heard about the meteor.
"230 tons of TNT" I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"? The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.
It's the most common unit for describing the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon. So, it's a lot smaller than the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII, but a lot bigger than a Davy Crockett. That's a sort-of-useful frame of reference. The only other things I can think of that would create a similar kind of blast are a volcanic eruption or something like that fertilizer explosion in Beirut in 2020 (~1100 tons TNT equivalent…
NASA: "Yep, that's a rock!"