Are meteorites hot or cold when they hit Earth?
Movies always depict meteors as flaming balls of fire, streaking across the sky, and igniting anything they touch after they reach the earth…Is this true? I know that they get hot as they enter our atmosphere, but I also know that it is pretty cold in space, so they start out with quite a chill. Do meteors really get hot enough to keep them flaming all the way to the ground? If a meteor fell at my feet, could I touch it? Would it be cold or hot? This is a good question, and one that we really don’t have a great answer for. It’s true that the chunks of rock and/or ice that form meteorites have been travelling through space for at least millions of years, and are therefore very cold when they begin their descent through our atmosphere. As they hit the atmosphere, the outside of the rock begins to heat up (forming the “fusion crust” on the meteorite). The hot outside begins to ablate (or be stripped off), which removes heat. The meteorite falls through the atmosphere in seconds, so for
