Explosion of a meteor ten times larger than Hiroshima

MADRID.- Every day, between 1,000 and 10,000 tons of materials arrive on Earth from space. The quantity is large, but it falls very widely and the Earth is practically uninhabited. Only 1% of the planet is populated, so it is normal that we did not realize that the rocks were raining. In our experience, only the lightning they produce when they decay into the atmosphere in the form of shooting stars.

But from time to time, a larger rock with catastrophic potential arrives. In 2013, a meteor exploded on the Russian region of Chelyabinsk, releasing 30 times more energy than the atomic bomb of Hiroshima. It was the biggest recorded impact of the century and there was still broken glbad and some minor injuries. A few days ago, according to reports
NewscientistPeter Brown, of the University of Western Ontario (USA), announced that another big impact, caused by an object ten meters in diameter, had rocked the Earth last December, but in a region so far away that no one I've seen.

The explosion of the meteor in the atmosphere occurred in the Bering Sea, near the Kamchatka Peninsula, and released ten times more energy than the bomb. Hiroshima. The discovery of this explosion was made possible by a global infrasound surveillance system, undetectable to the human ear, deployed throughout the world during the Cold War to monitor secret nuclear tests.

The discovery of this great impact again draws attention to the difficulty of detecting objects of a few meters in diameter that, if they fall or explode on a population, can have catastrophic consequences. The US Congress has mandated NASA to identify 90% of asteroids whose orbits near the Earth reach 140 meters in diameter or more. Fifteen years ago, it was felt that it would be possible to have this catalog by 2020, but with the current technology, it will probably take another three decades.

Josep María Trigo, a researcher at the Institute of Space Science (CSIC) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), explains that although most objects of this size are still unknown, these dimensions of 10 meters Several follow-up projects can already locate them a few days in advance.

Trigo recalls that in 2008 "the 2008TC3 asteroid was, with 4 meters in diameter, the first of this size colliding with the Earth, detected with a margin of about twenty hours".

Salvador Sánchez, director of the Astronomical Observatory of Mallorca and member of one of the teams having discovered the largest number of objects in orbit near the Earth in the world, says that this type of 39, impact is relatively common.