This column first ran in The Tablet in January 2014 On February, 15, 2013 [one year before this column first ran], a twenty-meter chunk of space rock hit the Earth over Chelyabinsk, Siberia. Shining brighter than the sun, its fall was recorded by video cameras as far as 700 km away. Thousands of people in Chelyabinsk ran to their windows to see what that bright light was; a few moments later, the impact’s sonic boom arrived and shattered those windows. More than 1500 people were hurt by flying glass and debris. Seventy kilometers west of Chelyabinsk, an eight meter wide hole was found in the ice of Lake Chebarkul; last summer, a half-ton meteorite was recovered from the lake bottom. It’s not every day that a rock with half a megaton of energy hits the Earth above a major city (a million people live in Chelyabinsk). But near earth asteroids are hardly rare. The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, keeps … Continue reading →