What is bolide impact mean?
Definition: The impact of an extraterrestrial body on the surface of the earth.
What is a bolide collision?
A bright meteor may be called a bolide. Bolide is a general term for any object originating in space that collides with the Earth or explodes in the atmosphere. It covers meteorites, asteroids and comets.
What is the meaning bolide?
a large meteor
Definition of bolide : a large meteor : fireball especially : one that explodes.
How do bolides happen?
Meteor showers occur when dust or particles from asteroids or comets enter Earth’s atmosphere at very high speed. When they hit the atmosphere, meteors rub against air particles and create friction, heating the meteors. The heat vaporizes most meteors, creating what we call shooting stars.
Where do bolides happen?
Most meteors occur in Earth’s mesosphere, about 50-80 kilometers (31-50 miles) above the Earth’s surface. Even the smallest meteors are visible from many kilometers away because of how fast they travel and how brightly they shine.
What causes bolide impact?
The coincidence of a large asteroid or comet (bolide) impact with the mass extinction of life that occurred at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary (65 million years ago) suggests that the extinctions were caused by climatic and environmental changes triggered by the impact event (Alvarez et al., 1980; Toon et al..
Why are there more bolide events at night?
This is because: they fall over the sparcely populated areas that make up the majority of the Earth (including oceans) they fall during the day and are masked by the brightness of the Sun. they fall during the night when few people are awake to observe them.
How often do bolides occur?
about once every 50,000 years
Due to the combination of all of these factors, only a handful of witnessed meteorite falls occur Each year. As an order of magnitude estimation, each square kilometer of the earth’s surface should collect 1 meteorite fall about once every 50,000 years, on the average.
How common are bolides?
A bolide is a meteor that is brighter than the planet Venus (i.e. a fireball), and which explodes or breaks up (usually accompanied by a sonic boom) before reaching the ground. There are of order 5,000 bolides per year fall to Earth but very few of these are actually observed.
What causes a bolide impact?
A meteorite impact occurs when a rocky, metallic (typically iron), or icy body that had been orbiting the Sun passes through the atmosphere to hit the Earth’s surface.
How do bolide impacts affect climate?
It has been proposed (Segura et al., 2002, 2008, 2012) that bolide impacts could have triggered a long-term climate change, producing precipitation and runoff that may have altered the surface of Mars in a way that could explain (at least part of) this evidence.
What are the effects of bolide impact?
Asteroid impacts produce an array of impact effects that can harm human populations. A list of seven such impact effects is recognized and described in Hills and Goda [1993] and Collins et al. [2005]. They are wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking, ejecta deposition, and tsunami.