Every year, the Earth’s atmosphere burns up millions of pieces of space debris, many of which briefly flare and appear as “shooting stars” in the sky. But how many make it through their rapid descents to the ground?
Less than 10,000 meteorites are thought to crash into Earth’s land or ocean every year, which is negligible compared to the moon, which lacks an atmosphere and is hit by meteorites of all shapes and sizes.
Meteoroids, or the smallest asteroids in the solar system, are the space rocks that frequently become meteorites. According to the American Meteor Society, these range in size from boulders that are roughly 1 meter (3 feet) large down to micrometeoroids that are the size of dust grains.
These fiery, falling pebbles are known as meteors. As meteoroids smash through Earth’s atmosphere, they burn up from air friction and form streaks of light across the sky. Each day, thousands of fireballs flare across the Earth’s sky, but most of these occur over the oceans and other remote areas, and many are obscured by daylight.
Gonzalo Tancredi, an astronomer at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, stated that the meteor showers connected to cometary dust are where the majority of Earth-detected meteors originate.
Tancredi examined data from the Meteoritical Society to determine the approximate number of meteorites that successfully strike Earth each year. There were 95 reports of meteorites falling to Earth between 2007 and 2018, with an average of 7.9 reports per year.
Tancredi calculated that the proportion of Earth’s land that is covered by urban sprawl divided by the number of meteorites reported in urban areas about equals the overall number of terrestrial meteorite that falls over the planet. Overall, Tancredi predicted that “roughly 6,100 meteorite falls every year across the entire Earth, and around 1,800 over the land.”
