At 03:06 PM 2/15/2013, Jed Rothwell wrote:
If the 1908 Tunguska meteor had struck a city, it would have
completely destroyed it. Even the largest city such as London,
Paris or New York would have been completely leveled.
Nature comment (we know they're an unbiased source!)
http://www.nature.com/news/russian-meteor-largest-in-a-century-1.12438
"It was a very, very powerful event," says Margaret Campbell-Brown,
an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada,
who has studied data from two infrasound stations near the impact
site. Her calculations show that the meteoroid was approximately 15
metres across when it entered the atmosphere, and put its mass at
around 7,000 metric tonnes. "That would make it the biggest object
recorded to hit the Earth since Tunguska," she says.
ps -- Thanks, Harry, for the orbital correction. But for a
fast-moving (relatively) meteor + asteroid I think my sine-wave is a
good first-approximation. (Too lazy to do the math).
