Giant meteorite fireball hits Russia!

They decided to tackle the problem with brute computational force, running simulations of billions of possible orbits to find the ones most likely to have led to a collision. They then used the average of the ten best orbits to search a NASA asteroid catalogue for known objects on similar paths. They found about 20, ranging in size from 5 to 200 metres across, they report in an article to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters1.

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The best sibling candidate, for instance, is a 200-metre-wide asteroid known as 2011 EO40, whose orbit was calculated from observations taken over just 34 days. That is too short a time to be able to pinpoint its position in the future, says Jon Giorgini, a senior analyst in the Solar System Dynamics Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. For that, researchers would need observations taken over the asteroid's two-year orbit, he says.


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The only way to prove a connection would be to collect samples from one of the proposed family members and compare them with meteorites collected from the Chelyabinsk region, says Carlos de la Fuente Marcos. However, a cheaper way to find out whether the suspected siblings have at least a passing resemblance could be to measure their composition from their light spectra.