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A meteorite is a portion of a meteoroid or asteroid that survives its passage through the atmosphere and hits the ground without being destroyed. [22] Meteorites are sometimes, but not always, found in association with hypervelocity impact craters ; during energetic collisions, the entire impactor may be vaporized, leaving no meteorites.
A "meteorite fall", also called an "observed fall", is a meteorite collected after its arrival was observed by people or automated devices. Any other meteorite is called a "meteorite find". [ 43 ] [ 44 ] There are more than 1,100 documented falls listed in widely used databases, [ 45 ] [ 46 ] [ 47 ] most of which have specimens in modern ...
Another example not recorded in human history was an object believed to have been about 50 meters in diameter, a massive chunk of iron that formed the Barringer meteor crater in Arizona. It's a 1. ...
The Hoba meteorite is thought to have impacted Earth less than 80,000 years ago. It is inferred [4] that the Earth's atmosphere slowed the object in such a way that it impacted the surface at terminal velocity, thereby remaining intact and causing little excavation (expulsion of earth).
The best modern comparison is the 1908 Tunguska Event, when an asteroid or comet fragment measuring 30-50 meters exploded over Siberia, flattening 80 million trees across 770 square miles.
There is broad consensus that the Chicxulub impactor was a C-type asteroid with a carbonaceous chondrite-like composition, rather than a comet. [ 29 ] [ 67 ] These types of asteroids originally formed in the outer Solar System, beyond the orbit of Jupiter . [ 67 ]
Asteroid (101955) Bennu seen ejecting particles by the OSIRIS-REx. Active asteroids are objects that have asteroid-like orbits but show comet-like visual characteristics. That is, they show comae, tails, or other visual evidence of mass-loss (like a comet), but their orbit remains within Jupiter's orbit (like an asteroid).
The object that struck the moon is estimated to have been about 15 miles (25 km) in diameter, larger than the asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago and doomed the dinosaurs.