The uninvited:
Blinding flash as hurtling space debris sets off shockwave
The trail of a falling meteorite shows Chelyabinsk, Russia, under attack from stones from outer space on Friday.
A plunging meteor exploded with a blinding flash across the sky above Russia’s Ural Mountains on Friday, sowing panic as the hurtling space debris set off a shockwave that smashed windows and injured almost 500 people.
The extraordinary event brought morning traffic to a sudden halt in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk as shocked drivers stopped to watch the falling meteor partially burning up in the lower atmosphere and light up the sky.
“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 km east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.
“We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was, and we heard a really loud thundering sound,” he said.
Another resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.
The emergencies ministry said 474 people were wounded, 14 of them seriously, by the damage caused mainly to windowpanes by the shockwave in Chelyabinsk and other towns in the Urals. Mobile communications were temporarily cut.
It was not clear if the meteor’s entry into the atmosphere was linked to the asteroid 2012 DA 14, which was expected to pass about 27,000 km above Earth later on Friday in an unusually close approach.
“At 0920, an object was observed above Chelyabinsk, which flew by at great speed and left a trail behind. Within two minutes, there were two bangs,” regional emergencies official Yuri Burenko said in a statement. “The shockwave broke glass in Chelyabinsk and a number of other towns in the region,” he said.
The Chelyabinsk region is Russia’s industrial heartland, filled with smoke-chugging factories and other huge facilities that include a nuclear power plant and the massive Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment center.
The office of the local governor said in a statement that a meteorite had fallen into a lake outside the town of Chebakul in the Chelyabinsk region. This was not confirmed by federal officials, who insisted any fragments were yet to be found.
There were no reports that any locals had been hurt directly by a falling piece of meteorite. The defense ministry, meanwhile, said it had sent soldiers “to the sites of impact”.
Schools were closed for the day, and theater shows were canceled across the region after the shock wave blew out windows amid temperatures as low as -18 C.
The local postal service said several of its buildings had been damaged, while the stadium of Chelyabinsk’s Traktor ice hockey side was also hit, forcing the cancellation of a match.
State television showed a part of the roof and a wall shorn off a brick zinc factory in the city of Chelyabinsk. Other images showed people with bloodied faces and at least one child’s back covered with blood.
The meteor “was quite a large object with a mass of several dozen tons”, estimated Russian astronomer Sergei Smirnov of the Pulkovo observatory in an interview with the Rossiya 24 channel.
NASA estimates that a smallish asteroid such as the 2012 DA 14 flies close to Earth every 40 years but hits the planet only once every 1,200 years.
But the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion appears to be one of the most stunning events over Russia since the 1908 “Tunguska event”, when a massive blast most scientists blame on an asteroid or a comet impact ripped through Siberia.