There is nothing more certain in life than death – a cheerful thought for a dismal February. Even though we are aware of that inevitability, we don’t expect death literally to strike out of an empty sky, which reportedly is what happened to Kamraj, a bus driver in Vellore town, Tamil Nadu.
Accounts of the event near the Bharathidasan Engineering College campus are fairly unanimous: there was a sudden explosion, a crater appeared, windows in surrounding buildings were blown out and flying debris struck several people in the vicinity, including Kamraj. At first, it was thought that the explosion was caused by the inadvertent detonation of material at a building site. But police later ruled that out, as they couldn’t find any traces of explosives.
The report that something fell out of the sky has to be taken seriously. Meteorites do just randomly fall out of the sky all over the Earth’s surface, at a rate of about 40,000 tonnes of rock and metal each year. Admittedly, most of this material falls as particles of dust less than 100 micrometres across, but every year, about 5000 football-sized objects land. However, as the majority of our planet is actually uninhabited, most of these fall in the sea or in unpopulated regions, meaning we very rarely see them.
Spectacular events, such as at Chelyabinsk in Russia almost exactly three years ago, when a huge, bright fireball caused a blast that shook buildings, broke windows and injured over 1000 people, demonstrate the destructive power of a meteorite impact. The Chelyabinsk meteorite was much bigger than a football, and is the sort of event that occurs once in a century.