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Wednesday 21 September 2022

How many meteorites hit the Earth every year?

How many meteorites hit the Earth every year?




You may never have actually viewed a meteorite, but they keep falling to earth. As per a study by researchers at the University of Manchester and Imperial College released in Geology, there are about 17,000 of them a year. One cause for their apparent invisibility is their size, which shrinks after passing via the Earth's atmosphere to the point at which they are virtually Intangible.



WHAT IS A METEORITE ?

As per NASA, a meteorite is a space rock that reaches the Earth's atmosphere and survives the travel to the surface. The term meteorite is repeatedly confused with other terms like  meteor and meteoroid, with which it is related:


Meteoroid: comet or asteroid rock particles with diameters ranging from centimetres to metres that orbit in the space. It is the name provided to a meteorite that has not yet entered into contact with the atmosphere.

Meteor: Happens when a meteoroid passes through atmosphere, burning and disintegrating - after which it is contemplated to be a meteorite. When the light trail persists, it provides rise to what are commonly known as shooting stars.



How many meteors fall to the Earth and where

As per the research Enlace externo, se abre en ventana nueva.  referred to above, there are roughly 17,000 a year. But how did they reach to this conclusion? The scientists explain that recent estimates of extraterrestrial material falling to Earth "are based on a short-term fireball monitoring or meteorite find networks that are spatially very limited". To overcome this trouble , they spent 2 years searching for meteorites in Antarctica, where they are simpler  to spot as they stand out against with the snow. Knowing the number of impacts in this area, they were able to extrapolate to the rest of the planet.


The researchers did not select Antarctica because greater numbers of meteorites fall there. In fact,  the number of impacts at the poles is only 65 % of those at the equator, for specimen ,  the area of the planet most affected. The model, made in collaboration with NASA's Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), even permitted a reassessment of the danger of large meteorite impacts by location, which is 12 per cent  higher at the equator and 27 per cent lower at the poles.

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