How many meteorites hit Earth each year?
Most meteors that you see in the sky are caused by pea-sized pieces of rock and there’s a lot of stuff this size in the solar system that Earth can run into! We can estimate the number of meteorites per year by carefully monitering the meteorites per day in one area, for example by using an all-sky camera to image the meteors visible in a given location, and then assume that all areas get roughly the same number of meteorites and add up the total. Another way to tell how many meteorites hit Earth each year is to look at the number of meteorites found in dry regions where there isn’t much vegtation or erosion (like deserts), where you expect to be able to find most of the meteorites that fell. We can get an estimate of how long ago the meteorite fell to Earth by looking at how it’s been weathered, or altered by Earth’s atmosphere and the local climate. Then we can plot how many meteorites fell at that region per year. However, I can still find a lot of different estimates for how much s
