Can meteorites move at a speed close to the speed of light?

I Think for anybody today not a secret that our planet – from the very moment of its birth, some 4.5 billion years ago – is constantly exposed to a real bombing... meteorites. Of course, today the situation is fundamentally different from the one that was billions of years ago, but asteroids and meteors are still falling on our planet. So, every day the Earth gets about 100 000 kg of extraterrestrial matter in the form of dust grains, the size 99% of which varies in the region of 0.5 mm. However, only a few meteorites reach the Earth's surface. But the speed with which the flying asteroids and meteorites, and where does the speed of light? In this article you will learn what space objects fly faster than others and here supernova.

How do meteorites fall?

To understand all the intricacies of life on our planet in the vastness of the cosmic ocean, let's remember what are meteors and asteroids and how they generally fall to the Ground. It is important to understand that in space, among stars and planets, there is a countless number of celestial objects.

So, the asteroid is a cosmic body, similar to planets, but not as large, but that doesn't stop some asteroids to acquire their own orbit and moons. There is still space dust is tiny particles of matter that are dispersed in space. the And intermediate objects of medium size – their size usually varies from 0.1 mm to 10-30 mm is the meteorites. However, scientists know about the existence of a huge meteorite, the size of which reaches a length of two and a half meters and more. They can be dispersed in space, can move along arbitrary trajectories, and their orbits can be relatively stable. Sometimes there is a whole cluster of meteorites – the so-called Roy.

Supernova or supernova — a phenomenon in which the star dramatically increases its brightness by 4-8 orders of magnitude with a subsequent relatively slow decay.

But the speed with which these move through the vastness of the infinite Universe and what happens when they fall on our planet? The fastest meteoroids move at a speed of 42 kilometers per second (km/s). However, the speed of meteors that manage to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and reach the surface of the planet is much lower, about 12 km/s. However, theoretically, at least according to scientists, there may be some not yet discovered objects whose velocity is much, much higher.

The fastest meteorites

When a space body flying towards our planet, its main task (call it so) – to enter the Earth's atmosphere and not disintegrate. As I said, only a few bodies are mainly of larger size reach the Earth's surface.

And yet, much more meteorites bombardment that subjected Land – so small that remain unnoticed. Writes , according to the results of a new study by Harvard astronomers Amir Siraj and Professor Abraham Loeb, the atmosphere of Earth is bombarded with space rocks ranging in size from 1 mm to 10 cm, which move at extremely high speeds. These objects, according to the researchers, could have come from the explosion of supernovae, which cause the particles to be accelerated up to subrelativistic or even relativistic speeds several thousand times the speed of sound and reaching to the fraction of the speed of light.

Note that the work has not yet passed peer review and been published to date on . It is noteworthy that the work is dedicated to one of the main mysteries in astrophysics, which is whether the emissions created by a supernova, can be accelerated to relativistic speeds and pass through the interstellar medium to reach the Earth's atmosphere.

the Earth is under attack

As told to the authors of the study publication , despite a strong theoretical basis, the question of whether meteorites larger than a speck of dust in the Earth's atmosphere at subrelativistic or relativistic speeds remains open. So just to confirm that these are very fast meteors real need tools that don't yet exist and which, among other things, should include microphones for recording infrasound, and infrared devices for measuring temperature. According to calculations, to the theoretically availablemeteorites will require a global network of some 600 detectors.

The Authors also note that today scientists have a great opportunity to explore a whole new kind of objects that regularly interact with the Earth's atmosphere. Moreover, their study is a new opportunity to learn more about supernovas. Well, we just need to hope that astronomers will eventually be able to unravel the mysteries of the Universe.

the Meteors — fragments of space objects, a particle size of several centimeters, which enter the atmosphere at speeds of tens of kilometres per second and burn up, creating bright sipsma — falling star.