By now, you're probably familiar with the meteor that exploded in the earth's atmosphere on Friday. About 930 miles east of Moscow, in remote Chelyabinsk, a speeding space rock hurtled through the sky, injuring over 1,000 Russians (and frightening the rest of the world, once video was uploaded by eye witnesses). And the Russian meteor wasn't even the asteroid we were expecting.
But what, scientifically speaking, really happened? Scientists are beginning to piece together the details of the Russian meteor explosion, which they say was the biggest event since the Tunguska impact of 1908. That year, a 150-foot, 100,000-ton meteor exploded over Siberia, razing 800 square miles and 80 million trees.
Friday's rock was smaller in diameter, about 50 feet across upon its entry, before it exploded about eight to 12 miles above the ground. NASA's term for this type of "exploding fireball" is a bolide, and this one was massive at an estimated 10,000 tons.
This latest Russian meteor was traveling at the breakneck speed of about 66,000 miles per hour, which accounts for the fireball it created in the sky (and the resulting, rather shocking, video footage). Rock heats up when it hits earth's atmosphere at high speed, and that's what makes it explode. "It's just like TNT going off, only much more energy," Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, told LiveScience.
For more illuminating science behind Friday's blazing bolide, check out the video above, and see the full animation below.