Definition
Impact fireball is the collective light, heat, and shock phenomena created when a relatively large solid object (“meteoroid”) encounters the atmosphere at high speed (>11 km/s).
Discussion
Surface damage from fireballs surviving atmospheric passage to the ground with a substantial portion of their original kinetic energy is usually confined to larger stony objects (the precise cutoff is poorly known, but believed to be in the range of >100 m) or small (down to a few meters in size) iron meteoroids (which comprise about 3% of the impacting population (Ceplecha et al., 1998)). Damage at ground level may also result from smaller fireballs that are stopped higher in the atmosphere due to airblast effects of the shock propagating to the ground.
The direct danger from fireballs increases with size – a 100 m diameter object (producing a very large fireball) is believed to impact the Earth roughly once per 7,000 years whereas a 2 m iron object collides with the Earth about once...
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Bibliography
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Brown, P. (2013). Impact Fireball. In: Bobrowsky, P.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Natural Hazards. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4399-4_186
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4399-4_186
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