Why don't skydivers burn up like meteors?
My third and fourth grade students want to know why meteors burn up as they fall through the atmosphere, but skydivers don't.
Your question is a good one, and the answer is really very simple: meteors travel much, much faster on their way through the atmosphere than any sky diver ever does. Think about how hot your hands get when you rub them together very quickly. Friction creates a lot of heat, because it translates kinetic energy (the energy of motion, that is, of your hands moving back and forth or of your meteor/skydiver falling through the air) into heat energy.
As meteors fall through the atmosphere, they tend to be falling at enormous speeds, around 26 miles per second! That's 93,600 miles per hour, and as you can imagine, that creates a lot of friction and a lot of heat. The surface of the meteor starts to vaporize when it reaches about 1100 degrees Celsius or 2012 degrees Fahrenheit. That's incredibly hot, and skydivers, by contrast, only fall at about 110 miles per hour. Your students will know from their experience that cars can go about this fast, and that they can feel the friction from the atmosphere (like having the window down in a car on the highway), but they also know that this amount of friction doesn't heat their skin.
Your students' intuition is right that similar things happen to meteors and skydivers as they fall through the atmosphere, but the speed makes all the difference in the end.
Related questions:
More questions about Comets, Meteors and Asteroids: Previous | Next
How to ask a question:
If you have a follow-up question concerning the above subject, submit it here. If you have a question about another area of astronomy, find the topic you're interested in from the archive on our site menu, or go here for help.
Main Page | About Us | For Teachers | Astronomy Links | Ask a Question | View a Random Question
URL: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=729
This page has been accessed 4783 times since September 12, 2007.
Last modified: September 12, 2007 3:03:32 PM
Comments? curious@astro.cornell.edu
Legal questions? See our copyright, disclaimer and privacy policy.
Ask an Astronomer is hosted by the Astronomy Department at Cornell University and is produced with PHP and MySQL.
Warning: Your browser is misbehaving! This page might look ugly. (Details)