love the artist's rendering accompanying the story

That's gonna leave a mark.

©

trailer and dog covered with pillows no where to be found

in other news, in AU today, the Beer Atom was split

Damn you and your copywrites Rat!

As Rat said. I think something the size of a house hitting the planet at multiple times the speed of sound would leave one hell of a mark. Unless, of course, it is a rocky meteorite that would have burst into itty bitty pieces before impact. An Iron meteorite however....

House sized, and hard to find? That would leave a copyright violation.

Maybe doghouse sized.

It's the day after tomorrow!!!

/cheesey pic

A METEORITE reportedly the size of a house fell on the NSW south coast overnight

Obviously God's just rubbing it in after NSW's pitiful defeat in the State of Origin. =P

I call shenanigans.

sumptin' wrong with my copyrights?

™

soon there'll be fire breathing dragons everywhere. wheres my gun.

So we track space junk the size of a pepsi can and did not see this coming?

youd think it would be really loud and more people would have reported it, or at least found something from it. meteorites that hit the ocean throw out ejecta that goes everywhere and if it had hit land everyone in a few hundred miles probably would have felt it. the 20 meter meteorite that hit Arizona or wherever a few million years ago left a 1200 meter wide and 200 meter deep crater. id had to think what a house sized one would do.

Wait, a house size meteor hits, and they DON'T THINK THEY'LL FIND IT? I'm confused... if someone knows better, explain that for me.

Oh, baloney. If it were really the size of a house, it would have left a mark not dissimilar to this one:



More likely it was the size of a golf ball. It's tough getting the right sense of scale in the night sky.

Maxamillius, we track orbiting space junk that size. And asteroids, comets coming from "expected" directions, and like not out of the sun's direction where they can't be seen. if an out-of-the-ecliptic meteorite twenty miles across was going to hit Australia from the direction of the Southern Cross tomorrow, we probably wouldn't know about it by now.

I don't know, depends on a house where...

They got some big houses in Texas, they got some small houses in long island.

Aussie Bloke surrenders?

Won't somebody think of the dinosaurs?

The other thing that I don't understand is that if it was the size of a house at impact wouldn't it be exponentially larger before it burned up in the atmosphere? Like so large that it would be indentifiable by astronomers?

well i was wondering when the international space station was coming down...

A driver on the Hume Highway shortly after 9pm (AEST) near Menangle reported an object the size of a house falling from the sky.

Likely alibi. But the DNA evidence will still prove that he killed the Wicked Witch of the East.

Another meteorite landed on some New Zealanders house this week. Sky over Australia falling? I think so...

Just a bolide, nothing to see here.

These aren't the 'stroids you are looking for.

I kill me.

Run! It's The End Times!

AAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!

Someone cue up Steve Tyler!

/I don't wanna close my eyes...

Okay, I'm confused:

1) Don't they have any seismologists in Australia? Didn't they detect the impact? If not, why not?

2) How far away would the "witness" have to be to witness this, accurately judge its size, and not die?

3) Even if the house-sized meteor only left a house-sized crater [note: it wouldn't, ed.]...can't somebody fly an airplane or helicopter over the "crash area" and find the thing, or at least the crater?

4) Isn't it more likely that the witness was doing what Australians are famous for, i.e. drinking his arse off so much that he halucinated the whole thing?

Indeed. A house-sized meteorite? It wouldn't have been the end of the world as we know it, but they'd still be cleaning up the dust in Sydney and maybe Jakarta a week from now if it had been that big.

Meteor fireballs in the sky are also a lot farther away than they seem. I saw one a few years ago that I would have sworn landed only about 20 miles away. I was able to look it up later on an astronomy site and it actually landed in the ocean a good hundred miles or more away.

The "police spokesman's" comment was reassuring. "Hail, I went out yonder and didn see nothin'. Course, I didn get off the hi-way. They aint nuttin out there cept kangroos and kactus, noway."

So...

i know that meteors in movies look very intense, but in real life they are not ACTUALLY equiped with explosives. a meteor the size of a house would not DESTROY everything upon impact in a huge fire ball of hot death.

The artist's rendering is the drawing for what was thought to be the dinosaur killer. I go to U of Washington and Toby Smith, the guy who was all over the news articles for the asteriod sighting up here, showed that drawing in class about a 100 times.

How much mess a meteor the size of a house makes depends on what it's made out of. If this was a stony chondrite, it would tend to explode on the way down, and for being as big as a house it wouldn't cause much destruction at ground level.

And the picture of Barringer crater that El_Swino posted? That was a 50 meter diameter iron meteor. That's a bit larger than most houses, and would tend to kill everything for miles around.

It would be a pretty large impact, the Tunguska meteor is believed to be around 60M, which sounds about "house size".

"Huge fire ball of hot death"

Thanks, Happygirl, I think you've just named my next band.

House sized, huh? Right. Have another Victoria Bitter bloke.

If the guy saw one that size hit he'd still be cleaning out his knickers.

Maybe houses aren't that big where you're from, Phanatic1a, but up here, we like to have a bit of space fer ta put up the inlaws when they visit.

el swino cool. glad i could be of some help.

Yay. If it's the end of the world, I'll quit paying my credit cards.

/house-sized meteorite = way more destruction than this

Don't worry - it's only Wollongong :)

is it just me or does this reek of a hoax. i mean wouldn't a house sized rock traveling mach 10+ make a huge farking hole?

Those damn Australians, always trying to one-up us!

*shakes fist ineffectually at Australia*

Does it seem like there's been a lot of meteorite hits lately or are just more articles about them getting green lighted? I don't really pay much attention to astronomy.

hey, knowing us, it was probably some kids trying to hit him with home made fireworks