20 times the force of Hiroshima...

***Update*** another view from space

...and here's what Hiroshima looked like right after

As I'm sure you've heard/seen/read about, a meteor hit Russia the other day with an incredible force. I've seen 20 times the force of Hiroshima, 30 times, it exploded right before it hit the ground, details are still being reported but regardless it was a big. The weird thing is how many dash cams people had running as it came down.





From the Telegraph:
The 55-foot rock, said by Nasa to have a mass of 10,000 tonnes, plunged to Earth in the Urals region on Friday morning, causing shockwaves that injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes in an event unprecedented in modern times. Nasa estimated that the energy released by the meteor's impact with the atmosphere was 500 kilotonnes, around 30 times the force of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It entered the atmosphere and broke up at an altitude of around 32 miles, causing a shockwave that blew out windows and set of car alarms in Chelyabinsk two and a half minutes later. Divers were this morning searching the Chelyabinsk region's frozen Lake Chebarkul for a fragment of the meteorite. No fragments have been found in the region so far - despite some 20,000 rescuers and recovery workers being dispatched to help the hundreds of people injured. An army of glaziers were also being transported to Chelyabinsk to urgently repair the thousands of broken windows in homes as night time temperatures fall below -15C. Scientists from Nasa, the US space agency, estimated that the amount of energy released from impact with the atmosphere was about 30 times greater than the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. 

Reports are saying over 1,000 people were injured directly as a result of the impact, a good portion of those injuries are due to flying glass after the shockwave. Click below for some more info.

 Sources -> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9874662/Russian-meteor-hit-with-force-of-30-Hiroshima-bombs.html
& http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/feb/HQ_M13-033_Russia_Meteor_Teleconference.html & http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/world/europe/russia-meteor-shower

Not the Kevin Costner movie

Recently the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a new class of planet, a "Waterworld" if you will. The new (dense) planet is larger than Earth, but smaller than Uranus.

From Hubble's office website:
Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It's smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.
Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b. "GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water." The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA's David Charbonneau, discovered GJ1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles, giving it an estimated temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favor of a steamy atmosphere," Berta said.

It looks like they're still working out the atmospheric pressure present on GJ1214b (which from now on I'm referring to as "Geoff"*). But 450°F is healthily in the steam side of water, using Earth's atmospheric pressure as a basis. Even without the water being in liquid state, this is a pretty huge discovery. Geoff could be a good place to start pointing SETI radio telescopes at and could be a good basis for modifying the current model for what can support life. Scientists believe it did exist in the commonly accepted habitable zone at some point in its history, how long or when is still to be determined.


Source -> http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/13/full/ via http://gizmodo.com/5887003/hubble-discovers-a-new-type-of-world-made-of-water

*If you get that joke, I'm impressed 

Metal ball falls from the sky in Namibia, nobody knows what it is...

That's the gist of it.

From Pop Sci:
A large metallic ball has fallen from the heavens and landed in a remote region of Namibia, spurring a lot of speculation about its origins and spurring local authorities to get NASA and the European Space Agency on the horn. No one is sure where the hollow metallic object came from, but it definitely came down hard--it was found 60 feet away from its landing site, a hole more than a foot deep and 12 feet across.

Source -> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-12/mysterious-metallic-space-ball-falls-earth-africa-baffling-authorities & http://news.yahoo.com/space-ball-drops-namibia-133326985.html