Pretty Meteor Shower Kills Thousands
When cosmic debris known as meteoroids enters Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds, the transition from the airless vacuum of space to the increasingly dense atmosphere of our planet acts as a wall. Slamming into that wall causes the meteoroids to burn and disintegrate, producing meteor showers. When seen on clear and starry nights, meteor showers are among the most breathtakingly beautiful celestial sights.
Sometimes, however, they are anything but breathtakingly beautiful. In 1490, meteor showers stopped being pretty to the inhabitants of Ch’ing Yang, in today’s Chinese province of Gansu Province, when one such shower suddenly went from picturesque to horrific. It happened in an instant, when one of the falling objects burst in the air during atmospheric reentry, killing thousands. As described by contemporaries:
“Stones fell like rain in the Ch’ing-yang district. The larger ones were [about 3.5 pounds], and the smaller ones were [about 2 pounds]. Numerous stones rained in Ch’ing-yang. Their sizes were all different. The larger ones were like goose’s eggs and the smaller ones were like water-chestnuts. More than 10,000 people were struck dead. All of the people in the city fled to other places.”
What Chinese sources described in 1490 is remarkably similar to the 1908 Tunguska Event. In the latter event, a meteoroid airburst at an altitude of 5 miles above a sparsely populated part of Siberia flattened 770 square miles of forest. So it is probable that the deaths during the 1490 Ch’ing Yang meteor shower were caused by a meteoroid taht similarly disintegrated in an airburst during atmospheric entry.