[news] Teenager survives a direct hit from a meteorite

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Amazing story:

Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw a “ball of light” heading straight towards him from the sky.  A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot-wide crater in the ground.  The teenager survived the strike–the chances of which are just 1 in a million–but with a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand.

He said: “At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand.  Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder.  The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards.

“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” he explained.

Scientists are now studying the pea-sized meteorite which crashed to Earth in Essen, Germany.

“I am really keen on science and my teachers discovered that the fragment is really magnetic,” said Gerrit.  Chemical tests on the rock have proved it had fallen from space.

Ansgar Kortem, director of Germany’s Walter Hohmann Observatory, said: “It’s a real meteorite, therefore it is very valuable to collectors and scientists.

“Most don’t actually make it to ground level because they evaporate in the atmosphere. Of those that do get through, about six out of every seven of them land in water,” he added.

The only other known example of a human being surviving a meteor strike happened in Alabama, USA, in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off furniture and landed on a sleeping woman.

Source

UPDATE: According to the information on MeteoriteAustralia site, this story is a hoax.

Myth 2: Meteors are still very hot when they hit the ground.

You’d expect that something heated up so much that it glows would still be hot a couple of minutes later. Actually, the situation is a bit more complicated.

The super-hot air in front of the meteoroid is not actually in contact with the particle. (A particle can still be referred to as a meteoroid as it races through the atmosphere, while “meteor” is meant to describe the whole glowing phenomenon.)

The meteoroid’s quick motion sets up a shock wave in the air, like from a supersonic airplane. The shocked air sits in front of the meteoroid, a few centimeters away (depending on the meteoroid’s size) in what’s called a standoff shock. Between the shocked air and the surface of the meteoroid is a relatively slow-moving pocket of air.

The surface of the meteoroid melts from the heat of the compressed gas in front of it, and the air flowing over it blows off the melted portion in a process called ablation. The meteoroid’s high velocity provides the energy for all this heat and light, which rob it of speed. When it falls below the speed of sound, the shock wave vanishes, the heating and ablation stop, and the meteoroid then falls rather slowly, perhaps at a couple of hundred mph (or a few hundred kilometers per hour).

It’s still pretty high up in the atmosphere at this point, and takes several minutes to fall to the ground. Remember, this tiny bit of rock spent a long time in space, and the core is pretty cold. Also, the hottest parts were melted and blown off. Even more, the air up there is cold, which chills the rock as well.

All of these things together mean that not only is the rock not hot when it hits the ground, it can actually be very cold. Some meteorites (what a meteoroid is called after it impacts) have actually been found covered in frost!

See commenter below.