Great Balls of Fire

This is a great thing about a small school: they can quickly
reconfigure to take advantage of learning opportunities.  I visited
Peregrine School for other reasons on Friday morning, but a meteor had
just injured over 1,000 people in Russia.  Students in all grades had
been assembled for chorus anyway, so right afterward I explained a bit
about the meteor and took many, many questions. 

I'm not going to write much here; the New York Times ran
excellent coverage (check out the pictures and video there, as well as the
articles listed under "Related").  If you just want to see some video,
here is a good collection of about four short videos which capture
different aspects such as the brightness of the flash, the eeriness
of the shadows, and the loudness of the boom.  After showing a few
quick videos to the kids, I really didn't say much; I just took
questions.  This was a great idea, because the kids eagerly presented
me with a fantastic variety of questions.

This was a great example of how the scientist-in-residence idea can
work well for a school.  Schools and scientists should do more to
cultivate long-term relationships with each other.

[If you want to know why there are rocks in space, here is a great visualization
of how very small grains of rock came together to form bigger rocks and
eventually planets in the early days of the solar system; some rocks still haven't
yet slammed into a planet because space is really, really big.]