EPS 80 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Kuiper Belt, Silicate Minerals, Oort Cloud
25 Oct 2016
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What hits the earth: asteroids/meteoroids, meteor in the atmosphere, meteorite on the ground, every asteroids had hard lives i. ii. creators / grooves. Remnants of the formation of the solar system that didn"t form into a planter: most are about 4. 5 billion years old, asteroids not all are solid i. Can be piles of dust and rocks held together by gravity: meteorites compositions range from iron to stony-iron to stony, most of the asteroids reside in the asteroid belt i. This is a dynamic situation: orbits can be unstable due to : Collisions: comets, comets are mixtures of frozen gasses and dust i. ii. Jupiter may tweak their orbit: comet distributions i. ii. Heated by atmospheric friction, this small stuff vaporizes. Large meteors begin to vaporize, slow break apart and fall to earth: meteor enters atmosphere at high speed, compression in front (increase p), vacuum behind (low p, when pressure differential > meteor strength = boom.
