Asteroids, comets, and meteors - OH MY!

The dangers of space are not limited to those who go there - space debris sometimes comes to us! The nuclear detecting stations that are in place to find out if anyone is detonating nuclear bombs have found something else entirely: we are being hit by way more asteroids/comets/meteors than we thought.

Source here

Fortunately, our atmosphere burns up a lot of the rock before it hits the ground - they are going such incredible speeds that they hit trillions and trillions of air particles every second, each one slowing them down a tiny bit, converting their kinetic (moving) energy into heat and light.

Pretty - and violent

You might have seen some of the footage from Russia last year, when a meteor streaked across the sky going 60 times the speed of sound - the sonic boom blew out windows for miles before the meteor exploded with a force 50 times that of a nuclear bomb. Luckily the explosion (the result of built up heat and friction, not a bomb of course) happened miles above the Earth's surface over a relatively desolated area; nobody was struck by meteorites, but over 1,000 people were injured indirectly by broken glass or panic situations.

Check out some of the best insane footage here:

How much would you be freaking out?

I've been using these words asteroid, comet, meteor, meteorite - but you might not know the difference! Here's a handy picture for that:

Fortunately, the Earth is very big and, percentage-wise, mostly empty space where it's safe for a meteorite to hit. You don't have any real cause to worry - especially since there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. But this is part of the reason it's important to fund space research, so that we can detect and potentially deflect a big, humanity-ending asteroid.

Jupiter is also well-placed and sized to protect us: because of it's huge size, it forms a sort of "gravity well" that captures some of the asteroids that might hit Earth. Hopefully this will never happen:

And there would be no sound

Also check out this awesome video of a skydiver almost getting hit by a small meteor: