That width is less than the distance I drive from my house to the grocery store. Why was that size of an asteroid able to cause such catastrophic damage?
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Energy= Mass X Velocity Squared. So as thing are bigger and faster they have more energy. Asteroids are really fast. Like 30to 60 times faster than a bullet. Based on that equation, when you double the speed, your quadruple the energy. Asteroids fly at around 60,000 mph. A 100 grain bullet fired at 2000 fps has about 900 foot pounds of energy. This is plenty to kill someone on the battle field. That same bullet flying as fast as an asteroid has about 1.7 Million foot pounds of energy.
The numbers become staggering pretty quickly. A few miles across may not sound very big, but think of how much dirt/rock weights (an 80 lbs bag of gravel isn’t very big). You get something that big and that heavy, moving that fast, and you fly right by atomic bomb energy that all gets released when it comes to a sudden stop hitting the earth.
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