Study: Chelyabinsk Meteorite Could Come from Asteroid Family

Images with the meteorite that hit Russia in February circled the globe in an instant and everyone wondered what was next for Earth.

Now, a new study shows the Chelyabinsk meteorite might not have been alone and could come from a massive cluster of rocks that broke off from an asteroid thousands of years ago.

The object that fell at Chelyabinsk was 18 meters (60 feet) wide and weighed 11,000 tons (22 million lbs), injuring over a thousand people.

Scientists believe that it came from a body orbiting the Sun 20,000 to 40,000 years ago and that disintegrated. The asteroid family it comes from is flying through space and any of the rocks could intersect with the Earth at one point.

The study run by Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and his brother Raul from the Complutense University in Madrid present reliable statistical evidence that Chelyabinsk meteorite came from an asteroid family.

They used computer simulations of billions of possible asteroid orbits to find the one fitting for the Russian incident and then searched the NASA database to see if any of them matched.

“It appears to include multiple small asteroids and two relative large members: 2007 BD7 and 2011 EO40,” the study says.