• Question: whats the fastest metriods that's gone past earth?

    Asked by ellieexo to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 17 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      Ooooh fun question.

      The true answer is no one knows for sure. There are at least millions of meteoroids that go “near” the Earth every day. Fortunately, most of these are very small, like grains of sand, but this makes them hard to spot!

      But they do travel very fast. Compared to the Earth, they will usually go several miles every second. I don’t know how fast the fastest ones are, but perhaps they could travel at 50 miles a second? That’s pretty quick – more than 2000 times faster than a car speeding along a motorway!!

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      It is a difficult question. Everything in the universe is moving very quickly but you can only observe speed relative to other objects. For example if you are in the International Space Station orbiting Earth you are tracing almost 8 km every second on the ground. But you are also orbiting the Sun together with Earth! The Sun is also moving around with the Milky Way rotating around what probably is a supermassive blackhole in the middle.
      I know this is a difficult concept but there are no stationary points in the universe, imagine a billiard table where all the balls are moving all the time, you can only measure the speed of one relative to another.

      So the fastest meteoroid would be one that is on a highly elliptical orbit around the Sun, going the other way to Earth (retrograde orbit) and crosses Earth’s orbit.

      Such a meteoroid could originate from a comet and reach speed of about 70 km/s.

      There is about 15,000 tonnes of meteoroids, dust and other matter entering Earth’s atmosphere every year so it is hard to say which one was in fact the fastest, as it might have been very small.

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