They come from space and strike the Earth like unexpected fireballs without warning. Sometimes their effects can be devastating to cosmogenic: they are credited with the extinction of the dinosaurs, while we all remember what happened last February, when a meteorite suddenly fell in Russia, causing great damage and injuries. They are certainly spectacular, with their fiery glow in the air, although most of the time they pass through the Earth's atmosphere completely unnoticed.
Over the billions of years of its existence, our planet has probably received hundreds of thousands of meteorites, but no one is able to know the exact number. In the last 2,500 years, 45,716 have been recorded, while 34,842 have been found in various parts of the Earth.
Of these, however, only 1,107 have been seen "in action" by human eyes, as a visualization by visualizing.org titled Bolides, which has even won praise from NASA's website, informs us in an extremely spectacular way. Its creator Carlo Zapponi has used data from the Meteoritic Society database to compile the history of all these falls.
The chronology begins in 861 AD. That is when we have the first “official” recorded testimony of the spectacular night fall of a meteorite on May 19 of the Julian calendar, in Nogata, Japan. The next morning the alien rock was retrieved from the hole that had been dug in the ground by the villagers and then transferred to the Shinto shrine of Suga Jinja where it is kept to this day.
On the left of the perfectly stylized graphic and with the spectacular bright fireballs crossing the sky in the background, you see the meteors "falling" in numbers, depending on the year. On the timeline line, you also see in blue the curve of their frequency over the centuries. By moving the "arrow", you are in the year you want and see the "action" of the meteors throughout its duration.
As you will notice, the frequency increases as we approach 2013, but this does not mean that meteorites have become more numerous and fall like hail over time. It is simply that the recording of observations has become more systematic. For millennia, their appearance was attributed to divine intervention, which is why the places where they fall have often been transformed into places of worship.
The first to openly propose the idea that they come from Space was a German physicist, Ernst Florence Chladni, who published a relevant study in 1794. His idea was initially met with ridicule, but at the turn of the century, sentiment changed when a similar study by the French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Jean-Baptiste Biot was accepted by the French Academy of Sciences.
Mr. Zaponi also presents some of the most important meteorites that have been recorded falling or found on Earth. By clicking on them you can see more details and be transferred to the corresponding information in the Meteoritic Society database. To see the visualization click here. (https://www.visualizing.org/full-screen/53518)
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