THIS IS A POST ABOUT METEORS
Jul. 5th, 2012 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
respectorcistSo apparently it is time for misconceptions showcase.
I am a nerd. I've been a nerd since I was a very little kid and told everyone who would listen that I wanted to be a paleontologist. That never happened because the midwest eats dreams, but anyway. The thing about the internet apparently is that it gives me the power to be a nerd a million times faster than I could as a kid. The beauty of computers. Deal with it.
Anyway.
So because I'm a nerd I like to watch people online argue about movie science. It's usually ridiculous and the arguers are usually right, don't get me wrong. But not always.
Today I stumble across someone bitching about the 2009 Star Trek movie which, yeah, totally relevant to just about every one of my interests, so I have to stop and read it.
This person says that it should be impossible to do Kirk, Sulu and Redshirt's suborbital drop from that (pretty extreme) atmospheric altitude without like, burning up because of friction or something. One of the displays in the film says that their velocity is slightly less than a kilometer per second. Air resistance would make them burn like meteors!
Like meteors!
Meteors, you say? OK, smartass. I'll take this one.
A meteor doesn't just fall down into the atmosphere, it plows into it. Sometimes the Earth plows back depending on which direction their orbits are going. Anyway, meteors are usually traveling at speeds closer to 100 km/s. At this speed, it strongly compresses the thin gases of the atmosphere as it moves, and when a gas is compressed quickly, it heats up. The violent compression forces a small pocket of relatively unmoving air to collect in front of the object (physicists call this standoff shock) which retains all of this heat and melts the facing side of the meteor which begins to fall away a little bit at a time and releases specific chemicals that create large amounts of heat and light when they're heated.
Friction has nothing to do with it.
Something falling through an atmosphere is not going to burn up because of friction.
Even something making a re-entry is not going to burn because of friction.
This entire rant is of course beside the point because people have actually made ultra-high altitude atmospheric drogue falls in real life. I just wanted to address this whole friction burns up meteors and that's why they glow thing.
I am a nerd. I've been a nerd since I was a very little kid and told everyone who would listen that I wanted to be a paleontologist. That never happened because the midwest eats dreams, but anyway. The thing about the internet apparently is that it gives me the power to be a nerd a million times faster than I could as a kid. The beauty of computers. Deal with it.
Anyway.
So because I'm a nerd I like to watch people online argue about movie science. It's usually ridiculous and the arguers are usually right, don't get me wrong. But not always.
Today I stumble across someone bitching about the 2009 Star Trek movie which, yeah, totally relevant to just about every one of my interests, so I have to stop and read it.
This person says that it should be impossible to do Kirk, Sulu and Redshirt's suborbital drop from that (pretty extreme) atmospheric altitude without like, burning up because of friction or something. One of the displays in the film says that their velocity is slightly less than a kilometer per second. Air resistance would make them burn like meteors!
Like meteors!
Meteors, you say? OK, smartass. I'll take this one.
A meteor doesn't just fall down into the atmosphere, it plows into it. Sometimes the Earth plows back depending on which direction their orbits are going. Anyway, meteors are usually traveling at speeds closer to 100 km/s. At this speed, it strongly compresses the thin gases of the atmosphere as it moves, and when a gas is compressed quickly, it heats up. The violent compression forces a small pocket of relatively unmoving air to collect in front of the object (physicists call this standoff shock) which retains all of this heat and melts the facing side of the meteor which begins to fall away a little bit at a time and releases specific chemicals that create large amounts of heat and light when they're heated.
Friction has nothing to do with it.
Something falling through an atmosphere is not going to burn up because of friction.
Even something making a re-entry is not going to burn because of friction.
This entire rant is of course beside the point because people have actually made ultra-high altitude atmospheric drogue falls in real life. I just wanted to address this whole friction burns up meteors and that's why they glow thing.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 08:15 pm (UTC)I'm not a physicist. I'm not a chemist. I'm not a scientist. Hell, I didn't even do that great in my science classes, but you know what I did? Paid attention. The person who said friction probably lost some brain cells due to friction trying to think up that solution.
Also, air resistance? Never mind that the Earth has a flipping atmosphere. We have bigger things to worry about like AIR RESISTANCE. Oi.