Why was the car that crossed the peninsula “exceptional” according to science?

There are several, he says, Factors Which raises it to the “exceptional” category. First of all, the fact that it was “excess body”in preference, which means that it has a luminosity intermediate between the moon and the sun.

Thanks to this glow and countless videos recorded at the time, Trejo and his colleagues were able to conclude Physical properties Body materials including its density and dynamic consistency.

Thus, the scientist draws attention to these details measuring “abnormal”. “After modeling the ablation of the superobject (the gradual loss of meteorite mass due to frictional heating as it passes through the atmosphere), the first surprise was that its size was unusual for a rock that was part of a comet. Its diameter was slightly less than one meter. “It’s too big and massive, about 700 kilograms, to be broken up by sublimation of the comet’s ice, but too small to be detected by telescopic robotic search programs,” Trejo says.

The scientist says, “To explain why a rock of these dimensions reached Earth, we must invoke another physical mechanism: perhaps the collapse of a fragile comet at the end of its winding, hot days from being too close to the Sun, and perhaps too close to the Sun.” What is called perihelion.” The object was “one of the remaining parts” of that comet.

«Based on the reconstruction of the tracks from the various stations and the speeds obtained – continues Trejo – we were able to obtain It rotates in orbit From the May 19 meteorite before it collided with Earth. The information reveals that this cometary rock followed a highly skewed orbit, in addition to that it approached the star at a distance of only one tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

This is surprising for such a fragile rock, and indicates that it came from the collapse of a comet that occurred relatively recently, astronomically speaking. Most likely, this object had a debris pile structure also typical of asteroids that broke up due to impacts.

Thus, the scenario that we believe explains what happened in the early hours of May 19 is that a comet, in a close pass from the Sun, disintegrated to produce the meteorite that, when it disintegrated and produced a luminous fireball, stunned millions of people. . He concludes that its fragility means that it did not go deeper than 55 kilometers above sea level, which is why it may not have allowed the meteorites to survive.