An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A → meteor exploded on February 15, 2013 over Chelyabinsk, southern Russia.The explosion occurred at a height of 20 km above Earth, releasing 500 kilotons → TNT equivalent of energy, approximately 30 times the yield of the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. It caused a → shock wave that damaged 7,200 buildings in six Russian cities and injured some 1,500 people, mainly from flying glass. Later, about five tons of meteoritic material reached the ground, including a 650 kg → meteorite that was recovered by divers from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul, on the slopes of the southern Ural mountains. With an estimated initial mass of about 12,000-13,000 metric tons, and measuring about 20 m in diameter, it is the largest known natural object to have entered Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 → Tunguska event.

See also: Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia, the capital of the Chelyabinsk region, on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains on the Miass River, 200 km south of Ekaterinburg and 1,879 km east of Moscow. The population of Chelyabinsk is about 1,183,000 (2015), the area, 530 sq. km; → meteor.