Originally published at: Possible meteorite impact caused smoldering hole in family's deck and melted their hot tub | Boing Boing
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Space debris?
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That may seem to be a long time but you have to remember these are the same people who study the effects of glaciers.
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Meteorites…how do they work?
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Look for the Starlink logo?
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They want to speed up that too, given the effect of global warming on glaciers.
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coming full circle from the other thread, let’s just call it an unidentified falling object.
of course, the newer parlance is “unidentified aerial pothole” 
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Wonder what that hot tub did to piss off the residents of Klendathu.
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Probably violating the Temporal Accords.
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“Dear baby Jesus, I have seen what you have done for others and ask that you do the same for me…”
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It might have put a hole in the deck, but it probably saved them the cost of rebuilding the whole thing by draining that “hot tub”.
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Very much doubt that it was a meteorite. A meteor of that size coming from space would have reached terminal velocity in the atmosphere pretty high up, and had plenty enough time for the relatively thin layer of superheated crust to cool down to ambient temperature (or at least to its internal temperature, which should be pretty cold). It certainly wouldn’t be starting any fires, despite cultural expectations created by movies.
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I strongly doubt it was a space rock. Those are usually cool when they reach the ground, having spent most of their existence hovering in the double digits of the Kelvin scale, a brief fraction of a second being blasted by the atmosphere, and then several minutes in the colder heights of that atmosphere before reaching ground level.
My bet is for a cigarette as the likely culprit, and terrestrial magnetic rocks are common as dirt.
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I didn’t think about holes or bubbles as being a telltale. You see them all the time in metal lumps smelted on Earth. Of course you wouldn’t get them in a vacuum.
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Of course, if you do encounter a genuine meteorite with bubbles inside, it’s quite probable that the bubbles contain an indescribable and hitherto unknown colour, which when loosed upon the land will slowly spread a creeping pestilence.
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Also skeptical.
- It seems rather small to have maintained any lateral speed through the atmosphere and the impact appears to have happened under a covered porch. (And as others have pointed out, small enough to have hit critical velocity much higher up. Same issue with retaining heat sufficient to start a fire.).
- To punch that size of a hole with a rock, it would have splintered a lot of the wood, spread debris around and maybe even broke a few joists. As impacts go, that’s pretty tame. If the hole was much smaller and the fire burnt the larger hole, that also doesn’t look right as the charring should be more spread out, less clear delineation between burnt/not burnt. A 4x4 was burnt through, that’s a big fire, yet there is only a thin outline of charring on the deck boards.
- Smoke woke them up. Not the sound of a rock blasting through the deck. No information on what the neighbors did or didn’t hear.
- Magnetic (iron) meteorites are dark. That one is much lighter and looks more like a “stony,” which would be only minimally attracted to a magnet.
- The fire burnt a hole in the hot tub. Water caries heat away. That’s why boiling water in a paper cup over a camp fire is is possible. Yet somehow the plastic got hot enough to melt through while the rest of the tub looks to be in pretty good condition.
Expert, I am not. Still, my BS detector is going off.
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