The sight of a fireball streaking across the sky brings wonder and excitement to children and adults alike. It's a reminder that Earth is part of a much larger and incredibly dynamic system.
So they mostly come from the asteroid belt, which itself is likely a few large bodies that got ripped apart by Jupiter and each other… This isn’t surprising at all, just confirmation of what was assumed already.
The speculation that “most” of the ~17,000 meteorites that fall each year come from just a couple specific asteroids within the asteroid families seems like overweighted nonsense to me, though. They don’t really seem to have a way to verify that, just modeling of an event 470 million years ago, and composition. They just know that they likely come from a few asteroid families, which can contain thousands of individual asteroids (though it’s also entirely possible that portions of the asteroid family were ripped away and obliterated in a separate event), possibly with very similar or identical makeup, so to then assert they “may” or “very likely” (both terms used in the article) come from a singular asteroid within the asteroid family is giving this research way way more weight than it should have, imho.
Unless they are trying to say (it’s early and I just woke up, so that may be it) that the original large body that was broken up is the source, but that’s so intensely “no shit, Sherlock” as to be basically meaningless. After all, the entire belt is a result of those large body breakups, and the asteroid families responsible for the meteors are quite sizable (three of the named ones, Flora, Massalia, and Koronos, contain a combined ~27,000 bodies)
So they mostly come from the asteroid belt, which itself is likely a few large bodies that got ripped apart by Jupiter and each other… This isn’t surprising at all, just confirmation of what was assumed already.
The speculation that “most” of the ~17,000 meteorites that fall each year come from just a couple specific asteroids within the asteroid families seems like overweighted nonsense to me, though. They don’t really seem to have a way to verify that, just modeling of an event 470 million years ago, and composition. They just know that they likely come from a few asteroid families, which can contain thousands of individual asteroids (though it’s also entirely possible that portions of the asteroid family were ripped away and obliterated in a separate event), possibly with very similar or identical makeup, so to then assert they “may” or “very likely” (both terms used in the article) come from a singular asteroid within the asteroid family is giving this research way way more weight than it should have, imho.
Unless they are trying to say (it’s early and I just woke up, so that may be it) that the original large body that was broken up is the source, but that’s so intensely “no shit, Sherlock” as to be basically meaningless. After all, the entire belt is a result of those large body breakups, and the asteroid families responsible for the meteors are quite sizable (three of the named ones, Flora, Massalia, and Koronos, contain a combined ~27,000 bodies)