Just a few days after meteorites and asteroids thought to would be cool the come around Earth, scientists have been busy figuring out what exactly happened in Russia, where on meteorite exploded and caused structural damage to some buildings. Peter Brown, from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, has been using low frequency sound waves detected during the incident to calculate the intensity of the explosion. As it turns out, as the ESA explains:
The object is estimated to have been about 17 m across with a mass of 7,000–10,000 tonnes when it hit atmosphere. It exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons of TNT –- some 30 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb — around 15 to 20 km above the ground.
Amazing, but scary.