HOw meteroite falls from sky?What is the effect on the earth?

Answer 1

Well, first off, it might be handy to know the difference between the classifications of celestial objects. An asteroid is a rocky body that is currently floating around in space, like those found in the asteroid belt, Oort Cloud of Kuiper Belt. A meteor is what you see in the night sky - the brilliant flare of light that results when it streaks through the sky. (You know, most of the meteors we see in the night sky are only as big as a mustard or sesame seed.) A meteorite is what you find on the surface of the planet - the meteor that has fallen through the atmosphere and survived.

Meteors come from all over the place - they're remnants of the early formation of the solar system, or the debris tails from other, bigger objects. Meteor showers result when the Earth's orbit takes it through the debris tail of something bigger, like a passing comet. But, when we see them in the night sky, we see very little rocks (usually - sometimes they're bigger) falling through the atmosphere at a speed of several miles per second.

The effect they have on the Earth, however, depends entirely upon their size and composition. Many scientists think that early in our planet's history, comets brought all the water you see today. Also, some scientists think that the Tunguska Event was the result of a comet exploding in our atmosphere. The famous extinction of the dinosaurs is thought to be the result of an impact near the Yucatan peninsula. But, believe it or not, between 80 and 100 metric tons of rock fall to the Earth every day, in the form of particles of space dust and meteorites. Even though this is a lot of stuff, it really has a negligible effect upon the Earth - we don't really notice a lot of it at all.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

As u know our planet Earth has it own gravitational force, when these particles or u can say meteorite comes near it is been pulled by the gravitational force and end up reaching Earth, it also depends on the size of the meteorite if it small it becomes ashes before reaching the ground and if it is big it can be destructive.

Answer 3

think of it as the earth flying through a cloud of galactic trash...as the pieces hit the earths atmosphere they become heated to where they are visible as they (usually) burn up. some skip off the atmosphere, most miss the earth completely, and some travel through the atmosphere. Most of those travelling through the atmosphere burn up completely or break up into such small pieces as to be nearly impossible to locate once they hit the earth.

The effect on earth is that the constant rain of microscopic meteorite dust adds some strange and exotic elements to the earth.

Occasionally, one is large enough to create craters on the earth and, even more rarely, kill the dinosaurs.

Answer 4

it is nothing but the hard rock which flot in the space in thereown axes vut sometime they lose there line & come out of there axesthey get attracted towards earth due to the gravity they come in force as there surfaceget hot & they start burning with fire this whenthis hit earth surface they spoil the environment living polluted due to this many deases occur

Answer 5

Meteors come from outer space, and
they burn up in the mesosphere and
never reach earth.

Answer 6

A meteorite is an extraterrestrial body that survives its impact with the Earth's surface without being destroyed. While in space it is called a meteoroid. When it enters the atmosphere, air resistance causes the body to heat up and emit light, thus forming a fireball, also known as a meteor or shooting star. The term bolide refers to either an extraterrestrial body that collides with the Earth, or to an exceptionally bright, fireball-like meteor regardless of whether it ultimately impacts the surface.

More generally, a meteorite on the surface of any celestial body is an object that has come from elsewhere in space. Meteorites have been found on the Moon and Mars.

Meteorites that are recovered after being observed as they transitted the atmosphere or impacted the Earth are called falls. All other meteorites are known as finds. As of mid-2006, there are approximately 1050 witnessed falls having specimens in the world's collections. In contrast, there are over 31,000 well-documented meteorite finds

Meteorites are always named for the place where they were found, usually a nearby town or geographic feature. In cases where many meteorites were found in one place, the name may be followed by a number or letter (e.g., Allan Hills 84001 or Dimmitt).

Meteorites have traditionally been divided into three broad categories: stony meteorites are rocks, mainly composed of silicate minerals; iron meteorites are largely composed of metallic iron-nickel; and, stony-iron meteorites contain large amounts of both metallic and rocky material. Modern classification schemes divide meteorites into groups according to their structure, chemical and isotopic composition and mineralogy

Meteorite fall phenomena

Meteorite which fell in Wisconsin in 1868 (Full image)Most meteoroids disintegrate when entering the Earth's atmosphere, however an estimated 500 meteorites ranging in size from marbles to basketballs or larger do reach the surface each year; only 5 or 6 of these are typically recovered and made known to scientists. Few meteorites are large enough to create impact craters. Instead, they typically arrive at the surface at their terminal velocity (free-fall) and, at most, create a small pit. Even so, falling meteorites have caused damage to property, livestock, and even people in historic times.

Campo del Cielo iron meteorite with natural holeVery large meteoroids may strike the ground with a significant fraction of their cosmic velocity, leaving behind a hypervelocity impact crater. The kind of crater will depend on the size, composition, degree of fragmentation, and incoming angle of the impactor. The force of such collisions has the potential to cause widespread destruction. The most frequent hypervelocity cratering events on the Earth are caused by iron meteoroids, which are most easily able to transit the atmosphere intact. Examples of craters caused by iron meteoroids include Barringer (Meteor Crater), Odessa Meteor Crater, Wabar craters, and Wolfe Creek crater; iron meteorites are found in association with all of these craters. In contrast, even relatively large stony or icy bodies like small comets or asteroids, up to millions of tons, are disrupted in the atmosphere, and do not make impact craters. Although such disruption events are uncommon, they can cause a considerable concussion to occur; the famed Tunguska event likely resulted from such an incident. Very large stony objects, hundreds of meters in diameter or more, weighing tens-of-millions of tons or more, can reach the surface and cause large craters, but are very rare. However, such events are generally so energetic that the impactor is completely destroyed, leaving no meteorites. (The very first example of a stony meteorite found in association with a large impact crater, the Morokweng Crater in South Africa, was reported in May, 2006.)

Several phenomena are well-documented during witnessed meteorite falls too small to produce hypervelocity craters. The fireball that occurs as the meteoroid passes through the atmosphere can appear to be very bright, rivaling the sun in intensity, although most are far dimmer and may not even be noticed during daytime. Various colors have been reported, including yellow, green and red. Flashes and bursts of light can occur as the object breaks up. Explosions, detonations, and rumblings are often heard during meteorite falls, which can be caused by sonic booms as well as shock waves resulting from major fragmentation events. These sounds can be heard over wide areas, up to many thousands of square km. Whistling and hissing sounds are also sometimes heard, but are poorly understood. Following passage of the fireball, it is not unusual for a dust trail to linger in the atmosphere for some time.

As meteoroids are heated during passage through the atmosphere, their surfaces melt and experience ablation. They can be sculpted into various shapes during this process, sometimes resulting in deep "thumb-print" like indentations on their surfaces called regmaglypts. If the meteoroid maintains a fixed orientation for some time, without rotating, it may develop a conical "nose cone" shape. As it decelerates, eventually the molten surface layer solidifies into a thin fusion crust, which on most meteorites is black (on some achondrites, the fusion crust may be very light colored). On stony meteorites, the heat-affected zone is at most a few mm deep; in iron meteorites, which are more thermally conductive, the structure of the metal may be affected by heat up to 1 cm below the surface. Meteorites are sometimes reported to be warm to the touch when they land, but they are never hot.

Meteoroids that experience disruption in the atmosphere may fall as meteorite showers, which can range from only a few up to thousands of separate individuals. The area over which a meteorite shower falls is known as its strewn field. Strewn fields are commonly elliptical in shape, with the major axis parallel to the direction of flight. In many cases, the largest meteorites in a shower are found farthest down-range in the strewn field.

The average meteoroid enters the atmosphere at between 10 and 70 km/sec. But all but the very largest are quickly decelerated to a few hundred km/hour by atmospheric friction and hit the Earth's surface with very little fanfare. However meteoroids larger than a few hundred tons are slowed very little; only these large (and fortunately rare) ones make craters.

Impact on Earth
A good example of what happens when a small asteroid hits the Earth is Barringer Crater (a.k.a. Meteor Crater) near Winslow, Arizona. It was formed about 50,000 years ago by an iron meteor about 30-50 meters in diameter. The crater is 1200 meters in diameter and 200 meters deep. About 120 impact craters have been identified on the Earth, so far.

A more recent impact occurred in 1908 in a remote uninhabited region of western Siberia known as Tunguska. The impactor was about 60 meters in diameter and probably consisting of many loosely bound pieces. In contrast to the Barringer Crater event, the Tunguska object completely disintegrated before hitting the ground and so no crater was formed. Nevertheless, all the trees were flattened in an area 50 kilometers across. The sound of the explosion was heard half-way around the world in London.

There are probably at least 1000 asteroids larger than 1 km in diameter that cross the orbit of Earth. One of these hits the Earth about once in a million years or so on the average. Larger ones are less numerous and impacts are less frequent, but they do sometimes happen and with disastrous consequences.

The impact of a comet or asteroid about the size of Hephaistos or SL9 hitting the Earth was probably responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It left a 180 km crater now buried below the jungle near Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula