Do you dare to guess an approximate value of these fireballs that cross the sky until they crash on the ground?
The meteors They are one of the most used celestial objects in the Science fictionespecially in that kind of disaster movies that have entertained us so much in recent decades. It is convenient, first of all, to know the distinction between asteroid, comet and meteorite, to then go on to shell out what types of meteorites exist and how many of them reach our planet every year. To do this, we invite you to continue reading the following paragraphs.
We are visited by cosmic objects on a daily basis and we are not aware of it
Habitually, meteorites come from asteroids and comets that are releasing ballast in space. However, according to information published on the website The Meteoritical Society, more than 300 of them They come from a place you wouldn’t think could be so close: the planet Mars. One of the best websites to find out about meteor news is the American Meteor Society, which was founded in 1911 to observe, monitor, collect data, study and report on these celestial bodies.
Recreation of a meteorite falling on New York City. DALL.E 2
Responding to the question that we raised in the headline, the fast answer is that it really turns out difficult to give an exact value. Several methods attempt to give an estimate, among which stand out the monitoring a part of the sky in a specific region, later extrapolating that number to the rest of the planet. In addition, you can also explore areas with little vegetation to know the meteorites that rest there and establish the time they have been there, again extrapolating the discovery to the rest of the world.
The estimated mass of space materialby these and other methods, that falls on Earth each year is among the 37,000 and 78,000 tons. If we add to this data that meteorites usually weigh between 10 and 1,000 grams, we can make the final calculation. They would be approximately between 18,000 and 84,000 meteorites those that reach the surface of our planet every year, having a minimum weight of 10 grams. If you want the daily figure, we would be talking about that between 50 and 230 meteorites impact on earth every day. If I were you, I would watch the sky when leaving home next time.