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Asked by anon-252804 to David on 4 Jun 2020.
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David Sobral answered on 4 Jun 2020:
Europe represents about 2% of the Earth’s total surface area (it’s tiny!). Every year there are about 6,000 meteors making it to the surface of the Earth. So that means around 100 meteors (on average) landing in Europe per year!
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Comments
John commented on :
Strictly a meteor is the flash of light in the sky which people call a ‘shooting star’. Most of these are ting grains of dust which burn up completely when they travel through the atmosphere. Only a very small number are large enough, and tough enough, to survive to reach the ground. If they do, and we pick them up they are called meteorites. These meteorites can vary in size from small stones to huge lumps of iron which can blast large holes in the ground called craters. I’ve been into two such craters, one in Arizona (the famous one) and another in the desert in Chile. Meteors are a mixture of interplanetary dust and dust lost from comets as they orbit the Sun. Stone and iron meteorites are bits from the asteroid belt, so when you hold one you are holding a piece of an exploded mini-planet about 4.5 billion years old. I always get a kick out of this.