Small Crater appears in Managua, or don’t believe what you’re seeing in the pressThis photograph com

Small Crater appears in Managua, or don’t believe what you’re seeing in the pressThis photograph comes from just outside the city of Managua in the nation of Nicaragua. Sometime late in the evening on Saturday, there was an explosion large enough to leave a crater ~13 meters in diameter in a forested area outside of the city’s airport.The area is isolated due to the presence of the airport and a nearby military base, so there weren’t many witnesses, although there are multiple press reports of people hearing an explosion.There are a couple possibilities for the crater. First, it could very well be the remnant of a small meteorite hitting the area. The rock needed to create a crater this size would be less than a meter across; they have that much energy, and meteorites strike Earth all the time. Rocks big enough to make a crater like this are too small to appear in most surveys of the sky, so we literally can’t see them coming.On the other hand…when you’re reading press reports about this crater, keep in mind that there is currently no evidence available it was an actual meteorite. There is no video of an object in the sky at present and there are so far no confirmed witness reports seeing something falling. That doesn’t mean people couldn’t have missed it, but it does mean that the people reporting on this crater should be using more skepticism than they currently are. The other alternative for a crater like this is that it could be from a bomb, maybe accidentally dropped on the site or perhaps even trapped in the soil here long ago and accidentally triggered.A survey of the site is going to be necessary to even confirm that it was a meteorite; you see here a person using a metal detector on it and there aren’t currently even reports of whether anything was found on Sunday to confirm the crater’s cause. Several scientists have been quoted today saying they’re sure it was, but none of the press quotes have explained why they believe this to be the case. As a reader, that should cause you to be at least somewhat skeptical of those statements.The worst reports I’m seeing this morning are all over the place and they link the crater to the passage of a different near-earth object, 2014 RC, that slipped past the Earth at about 1/10 the distance between the Earth and the Moon on Sunday. Apparently one local official mentioned this link and the worldwide press have run with it.The object that passed Earth on Sunday was a small asteroid, about 20 meters in diameter. If you’ve followed press reports, you have probably heard of several asteroids passing Earth at this distance this year, which is the case because these passages are fairly common. There are several of these per year and our telescopes are becoming better at finding them as they approach.So is there any connection between the two? Well, just from the information we have it seems extremely unlikely. First, the gravity of an object 20 meters across is tiny and the asteroid passed earth at a distance of 40,000 km. The Earth itself is only 12,000 kilometers in diameter, so for comparison, imagine how much effect the gravity of a 20 meter-sized rock on the opposite side of the world has on you.Detonations in mines regularly move that amount of rock and it doesn’t impact the gravity field of the planet, so it’s hard to see this object having any relationship to an object that was 40,000 kilometers away.On top of that, this crater reportedly appeared overnight on Saturday; the closest passage of the 2014 RC asteroid was more than 12 hours later. That means if this crater was created by an impact, the object was more than a million kilometers away from 2014 RC.There can be tenuous relationships between things in the asteroid belt, objects in the asteroid belt can be disrupted or spread out by larger impacts, but we shouldn’t just assume that’s the case without evidence. At this point, people saying that this crater was due to a chunk of 2014 RC are doing so in a way that strikes me as quite irresponsible and a lesson in how not to do science reporting.-JBBImage credit: Nicaraguan Armyhttp://nuevaya.com.ni/2014/caida-de-meteorito-origino-estruendo-nocturno-en-managua/Read more (and take with caution):http://www.irishexaminer.com/examviral/science-world/remember-that-meteorite-that-wasnt-supposed-to-hit-the-earth-well-it-did-285413.htmlhttp://mashable.com/2014/09/07/nicaragua-meteor-strike/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-linkhttp://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29106439http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-29106843http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/09/07/meteorite-strikes-nicaragua/15262973/ -- source link

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