: how are comets , meteorites and asteroids so powerful that they are able to completely annihilate their target in a matter of seconds?
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They are not powerful, they are just fast.
Imagine dropping a baseball on your foot from waist height and compare that with getting hit by a baseball by a professional player.
The ball is the same but the latter can really hurt you because it goes faster.
Or getting bumped by a car as it slowly tried to park versus getting hit by the same car at highway speeds.
It is not really the object that matters but the speed.
Technically both the mass and the speed matter, but it is a simple linear correlation for the mass and the square for the velocity.
So if you want to have an impact that is 100n times as powerful you can either increase the mass of the object a 100-fold or the velocity just tenfold.
Objects in our solar system tend to be going very fast in respect to one another when they cross paths and gravity helps accelerate them towards one another even more as they get closer.
Our atmosphere helps a lot dealing with smaller stuff, but any big space rock that makes it to near the ground relatively intact is going to be a huge problem.
Thankfully those impacts are rare at least on human timescales.
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