: how are comets , meteorites and asteroids so powerful that they are able to completely annihilate their target in a matter of seconds?

Question

: 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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Answer 1

Their energy comes from speed. Energy scales with the square of speed. A car at 100 mph has 100 times the energy of a car at 10 mph.

Now imagine a ‘car’ at 20,000 mph. That’s about the speed that something reaches falling into Earth’s gravity if it started with no speed at all. 40,000 times the energy of the same car moving at 100 mph.

But that’s just a little car. Cars are mostly hollow. A hunk of rock the size of a car would weigh something like 10 times as much. 400,000 times the energy of a car moving at 100 mph.

And these things can easily be bigger than cars.