Meteor (flying rock) gets broken apart by air?
In: Physics
Have you ever stuck you hand outside the window of a car driving down the highway?
You will have felt that the air going past was pushing at your hand and that the faster you move the harder the air pushes at your hand.
Sticking something light and fragile like a cheap paper flag outside the window of a fast moving car, will result in the object being ripped apart by the forces of the air rushing past.
Now imagine sticking something out of your car window when your car moves really really fast. That fast moving air will carry quite some force.
Objects coming down from orbital speeds move extremely fast. The International space station for example moves at speeds that would be something like 22 times the speed of sound if it were moving that fast near the ground.
At that speed the air will not really be able to move out of the way much at all. It will drag and tear at any tiny imperfections of the objects surface with enormous force. It will also heat things up with friction a lot. This sort of thing can for example rip apart a space shuttle coming down from orbit and turn it into a fireball.
So running into our planets atmosphere at high speeds can be a very destructive experience even for solid objects that were designed to withstand this kind of thing.
This brings us to the second part.
Many of the things out there are not very solid. There are snowballs and heaps of loosely stuck together gravel and things that even if you gently teleported them down to the surface and set them down without disturbing them would collapse under their own weight into a heap of material rather than remain stuck together as solid rock.
Of course there are also more solid obejects, but tumbling through the air at high speeds while being heated up red hot is not going to be doing them any favours either.
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