The meteor fragments have struck the southeast of the United States, here is what you need to know

The internal solar system is much calmer than 4 billion years ago, during what is known as the heavy bombing period. During this violent section, which lasted around 500 million years, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars and the Moon were regularly pounded by asteroids, meteors and other cosmic ammunition, many objects as large as the six -thousand rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Things have become much quieter since then, but that does not mean that everything has still happened. The earth still lives inside a shooting gallery, with thousands of objects – totaling approximately 48.5 tonnes per year, according to NASA – in the atmosphere.

One of these space rocks exploded in the sky above Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina at 11:51 HAE, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). The brilliant flash, accompanied by a sound boom that many have confused with an earthquake, led hundreds of calls and messages to the American Meteor Society (AMS), the recommended organization of NASA to signal meteoric fire balls. In the county of Henry, in Georgia, a house was struck by debris which crossed the roof and landed inside the residence. There was no reported injury.

“The Henry County Emergency Management Agency [EMA] We transmitted that a citizen reported that a “rock” had fallen through his ceiling at the time of the reports of the “earthquake”, said the NWS in an article on Facebook. “The county of Henry Ema also pointed out that the object had pierced the roof, then the ceiling, before cracking the laminate on the ground and stopping.”

The possibility of something falling from the sky this week was not entirely unexpected. Yesterday’s event occurred during the current meteor shower, which occurs once every 6.37 years, when the earth passes through the remains of the tail of the comet 7p / pons-winnecke. The Bootid is only one of the dozens of known showers that the AMS lists on its website. Many of these events produce only a beautiful mist of meteor fragments, visible only at night in dark conditions far from the city lights, and commonly called shooting stars.

The rock of yesterday was of a resolutely larger caliber, a large enough to be classified as a racing car, a meteor with enough mass to cause a brilliant flash and a sound boom while it slams in the atmosphere, but too small for the major part to reach the soil without being cremated first. To qualify as a racing car, an incoming meteor must reach the brightness of Venus, which, like the Moon, is often visible in the sky of day. According to NASA, a few dozen racing cars occur each year.

The most explosive recent racing car event occurred on Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15, 2013, when an object estimated at around 65 feet, exploded in the atmosphere, injuring nearly 1,500 people and damaging 7,200 buildings. The largest racing car in modern history also struck Russia during the famous Tunguska event in 1908, when a 350 feet. Meteor flattened 830 m². forest land.

The lower meteoric fireworks are much, much more common than the cars. According to AMS, several thousand small balls of fire burst into the atmosphere every day, but “the vast majority of them”, says the organization, “occur on the oceans and uninhabited regions, and many are masked in daylight”.

Despite the House of the County of Henry which was struck by the recent racing car, the chances of any place – or of a person – being struck by the space debris have disappeared. Barely 5% of the objects that enter the atmosphere survive the entrance fires and reach the surface. About 70% of this surface is the ocean and a large part of the rest is a desert or another little inhabited land. Finally, most meteorites that strike the planet are, at the time of impact, micromèteorites – too small to do damage. In all the known human history, in fact, there is only one person who would have been killed by a meteorite – an Indian bus driver who was struck by walking on the campus of an engineering college in the state of the Tamil Nadu on February 6, 2016. Homo sapiens About 300,000 years ago.