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A drawing of a meteorite that fell in Ukraine in 1866. Illustration: public domain
A team of scientists believe they have found the oldest evidence of a meteorite hitting and killing a person, according to a new article published in the magazine. Meteoritic and Planetary Science.
Surprisingly, there are few meteorite records that hit people, let alone kill someone. However, scientists from Ego University and Trakya University in Turkey and the SETI Institute in the United States found an 1888 record in the Directorate General of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, containing three manuscripts that they seem to report a death. caused by a meteorite.
The first manuscript, written on September 13, 1888, details a fireball that occurred one night in the previous month, over a village whose exact location scientists could not determine. Smoke and fire accompanied the flash, and meteorites rained down from the sky for 10 minutes. One man died and another was injured and paralyzed as a result of the event.
A second manuscript contained a request sent to Sultan Abdul Hamid II, asking what should be done about the event. A third also reports on the events and mentions that a man named Ahmed Munir Pasha sent a letter with “a piece of stone” to the Grand Vizier.
Basically, this is it: On August 22, 1888, a meteorite exploded over a village in Turkey, killing one man and paralyzing another. On September 13, a local legislator reported the event; the central government learned of this on October 8; and the sultan learned of this on October 9, according to translations of the new article, titled “First Evidence of Meteor Death and Injury.”
The translation of these documents brought their challenges: Ottoman Turkish is difficult to read, the scientists explained. The researchers noted that there are still many more records waiting to be digitized, and they have no physical evidence of the 1888 impact. This would be the oldest known record to bring the report, however, that a meteorite killed someone.
Meteor deaths are extremely rare. More recently, a bus driver in India named V. Kamaraj died in an apparent meteor accident at Natrampalli in 2016, although scientific experts, including NASA, refuted the claim.
The US National Resources Council. USA He estimates that 91 people are expected to die in meteorite-related accidents each year, but there are no records of those deaths. Meteor injury is perhaps more common: More than 1,600 people were injured when a meteorite fell in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. A famous case is that of Ann Hewlett Hodges: she was hit and lightly injured by a meteorite in Alabama in 1954.
Earth is large enough that the chances of dying from a meteorite impact are extremely small. Perhaps most troubling, however, are events like Chelyabinsk, where a larger rock hits a spot near an urban area. Scientists are working to protect the planet from such an accident, but they have a lot of work to do.
But don’t worry, you probably won’t die from a meteorite. Probably
