1490 Ch’ing Yang Meteor Shower
When streams of cosmic debris known as meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds, simultaneously and on parallel trajectories, the transition from the airless vacuum of space to the increasingly dense atmosphere of Earth causes them to burn and disintegrate, producing meteor showers. Streaking the night skies, especially on clear and starry nights, meteor showers are among the most breathtakingly beautiful celestial sights. Usually.
In 1490, in Ming Dynasty China, meteor showers stopped being breathtakingly beautiful to the good people of Ch’ing Yang in Shaanxi (today’s Gansu Province), who witnessed one such shower suddenly go from the delightfully picturesque to the horrific, when one of the falling objects burst in the air during atmospheric reentry, killing thousands. As described by Chinese records of the era, during an intense meteor shower:
“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.”
There are similarities between Chinese source descriptions of the 1490 event and what is known of the 1908 Tunguska event, when an airburst of a meteoroid at an altitude of 5 miles above a sparsely populated part of Siberia flattened 770 square miles of forest. As such, it is likely that that the deadly 1490 Ch’ing Yang meteor shower was caused by the disintegration of an asteroid in an airburst during atmospheric entry.