Daniel C. Bowman

The same explosion can sound different: it all depends on which way the wind is blowing. In 2024, researchers set off charges equivalent to ten tons of TNT twice and recorded the sound with a network of 31 microphones spread over a radius of 23 kilometers. The source was identical, but the acoustic pictures turned out to be quite different.

A pebble the size of a grape enters the atmosphere almost tangentially and skims across the sky without falling. That's exactly what happened to a meteoroid weighing about 45 grams. It came in at such a shallow angle that it traveled 164 kilometers at an altitude of 92 kilometers — where the air is a million times thinner than at the surface.