A Meteorite Crashed Through Somebody's Ceiling and Landed on Their Bed (chicagotribune.com)
- Reference: 0153823597
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/10/17/2338223/a-meteorite-crashed-through-somebodys-ceiling-and-landed-on-their-bed
- Source link: https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-nyt-meteorite-womans-bed-20211014-24gluwkodfa7rbxth346nv7w5e-story.html
> Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by "an explosion." She jumped up and turned on the light, [1]only to see a hole in the ceiling . Her clock said 11:35 p.m.
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> At first, Hamilton thought that a tree had fallen on her house. But, no, all the trees were there. She called 911 and, while on the phone with an operator, noticed a large charcoal gray object between her two floral pillows.
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> "Oh, my gosh," she recalled telling the operator, "there's a rock in my bed."
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> A meteorite, she later learned.
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> The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man's fist had barely missed Hamilton's head, leaving "drywall debris all over my face," she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it captivated the internet and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.
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> "It just seems surreal," Hamilton said in an interview Wednesday. "Then I'll go in and look in the room and, yep, there's still a hole in my ceiling. Yep, that happened."
The Times reports that Peter Brown, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, places the odds of a meteor crashing into someone's bed at 1 in 100 billion.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-nyt-meteorite-womans-bed-20211014-24gluwkodfa7rbxth346nv7w5e-story.html
Ruth Hamilton (Score:2)
Because meteors are ruthless.
Question (Score:3)
Does she get to keep it? Seems like an awful waste of a harrowing experience if she can't.
Sell it! (Score:2)
She kept the meteorite? These things are pretty valuable (http://www.meteorlab.com/METEORLAB2001dev/pricing.htm)! If I done the math right, for a 2.8 pound iron meteorite she can earn from US$675 to US$6,750. If it's a stone meteorite, it goes from US$2,540 to a cool US$25,400, sometimes even more.
Re: (Score:2)
She had better hope it is stone then. She's going to need the cash to fix her roof. I suspect her insurance is not going to cover meteor strikes.
Re: (Score:2)
> I suspect her insurance is not going to cover meteor strikes.
Why wouldn't it? UK home insurance (like US home insurance) typically covers all risks except those particularly excluded, and meteor strike is unlikely to be particularly excluded.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember watching a meteorite hunting reality show some years back and they had said that if a meteorite hits an object that it becomes way more valuable and the object that it hits is also valuable. So it may be worth way more than the figures you cited.
The size of a large manâ(TM)s fist?? (Score:1)
So when describing something that could have severely injured her face it was compared to a large manâ(TM)s fist ðY".
What are the odds? (Score:1)
A professor ... places the odds of a meteor crashing into someone's bed at 1 in 100 billion.
Tell me, professor,
What are the odds that a reporter or Hamilton made the whole thing up for the clicks?
Odd way to think of odds... (Score:2)
OK, let it be. Odds of X happening is 1 in 100 billion or 200 billion
1 in 100 billion what? If you wake up with a rock on the bed 100 billions one of the rocks would a meteor? Or if you wake up and there is no space rock on your bed, once in 100 billion times there likely will be a space rock?
There are 7 billion people waking up every day. In two weeks 100 billion times people would have woken up and checked to see if there is a space rock on the pillow next to them. About 25 times a year ...
There are
Re: Odd way to think of odds... (Score:2)
Hush now. Next you'll be complaining that lightyear isn't a unit of time and that parsec is a unit of distance.
Re: (Score:2)
The odds over an average lifetime, perhaps? Or maybe per 100 billion people over a time span of centuries? Some fuzzy math would be used for such an estimation, but that's the nature of statistics when _predicting_ odds.
Concerning its visit (Score:1)
Well, it obviously came to "rest" then.
Re: (Score:2)
Well done :)
Dog (Score:3)
How did the dog know a meteorite would shortly be crashing into the house?
Re: (Score:2)
> How did the dog know a meteorite would shortly be crashing into the house?
I know that this /. and all, but from TFA
> other Canadians had heard two loud booms and seen a fireball streaking across the sky.
I'd suggest that the dog picked up on that and just started barking.
I think the odds are more complicated than that (Score:2)
For one thing, you need to divide the Earth up into zones of diameter d and duration t to figure out how likely a strike is. Let's say a bed-sized diameter of 2m/6' and a person's lifetime of approximately 80 years.
Then you need to decide how much of the Earth is covered by beds, which due to population growth varies considerably. You probably cheat on this one and just assume it's the number of beds estimated to exist today and forget about variation over time.
Next, you need to categorize the meteors by
The house is safer now (Score:2)
Clip from "The World According to Garp". What are the odds of *another* meteorite hitting it?
[1]https://youtu.be/GTqz4duPdYQ?t... [youtu.be]
[1] https://youtu.be/GTqz4duPdYQ?t=81
Percentage of earth covered in beds. (Score:2)
So, assuming an average bed size of 39*75 in^2 and 8 billion beds with no stacking. A randomly chosen location on earth has a 1 in 34 thousand chance of being a bed.
Since her bed has two pillows it isn't unreasonable to assume queen size. That would be a 1 in 17 trillion per randomly chosen location.
So I have no idea where the 1 in 100 billion came from.
Are meteors attracted to sleeping people? (Score:2)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a farm house, bounced off a large wooden console radio, and hit Hodges while she napped on a couch."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)
Re: (Score:2)
I hope it didn't bust any tubes
Space Force where were you? (Score:2)
Why didn't NASA warn her? Where was the Space Cadet Thunder Force during all of this?
Wrong odds (Score:2)
"The Times reports that Peter Brown, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, places the odds of a meteor crashing into someone's bed at 1 in 100 billion."
Wrong. The odds are 1 in 1. It happened.
Wrong odds? (Score:3)
> "The Times reports that Peter Brown, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, places the odds of a meteor crashing into someone's bed at 1 in 100 billion."
> Wrong. The odds are 1 in 1. It happened.
Are you sure? I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it was a truly unique meteorite
odds... per year? (Score:3)
Odds of one in 100 billion... per what?
Per year?
Population of Earth is 7.8 billion, so that means you should see it roughly once every 12.8 years.
OK, sounds reasonable.
Re: (Score:3)
True, the odds are now 1 in 1 of a meteor having crashed into someone's bed, but that's probably not what he said.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh come now. Ruth was the 1 in 100 billion. I do suspect Brown's figure of 100 billion uses some "fuzzy" math, but it would still be a large number. Unless you're being sarcastic ;)
Re: Wrong odds (Score:3)
It's happened before. A woman in Alabama had burns and bruising in her body from being hit by a meteorite while in bed.
Re: (Score:2)
So, funny story, back when I was in school (like we're talking late 80's, early 90's) there was a story about a guy who found a meteorite in someone's back yard, and the local media picked it up and interviewed the family and they even got the local professor from... you guessed it... the University of Western Ontario, to come and have a look. He went on and on about this thing, and how you could see from the scorch marks this and that. Well of course it came out that it was a prank that the family's fath