The giant meteor that exploded over Russia in February, damaging buildings and injuring more than 1,000 people, may belong to a “gang” of space rocks hurtling towards the planet Earth, the international science journal Nature reported this month.
The 49-foot (15 meter), 11,000-ton (9,979 kg) space rock exploded near the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, Russia on February 15.
Scientists around the world have struggled to determine the meteor’s orbit, but there hasn’t been a defined path to help locate “sibling asteroids” on a similar route, until now.
Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, two brothers who are both orbital scientists at the Complutense University of Madrid, ran billions of possible orbits through a computer so they could identify the “most probable orbit,” then compared those results with an asteroid log compiled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).