“A meteor exploded in the skies above Russia’s Urals region, sending shock waves that smashed windows, injuring hundreds of people as an asteroid half the size of a football field approached the Earth.
More than 725 people in the city of Chelyabinsk alone sought attention for injuries, mostly from glass shards, according to the municipal administration. Across the Urals region, 112 were hospitalized after today’s event, Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov told President Vladimir Putin in a televised meeting.
“It’s very much a reminder that we live sometimes in a cosmic shooting gallery,” Alan Fitzsimmons, a professor of astrophysics at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, said by phone from Hawaii, where he is working on the Pan-STARRS project to detect so-called near-Earth objects. “These are natural phenomena that can have dramatic effects.”
Debris hit Earth at three points in the Chelyabinsk region, Vadim Kolesnik, an Interior Ministry official, said by phone. The meteor was at least 1 cubic meter (35 cubic feet), which if made of pure iron could weigh 8 tons, Sergei Lamzin, deputy head of the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute in Moscow, said by phone.
