Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/NASA
It was a typical February morning in Chelyabinsk, a large city sitting in the shadows of Russia’s Ural mountains. People bundled up to get into their cars to drive to work through the snowy Siberian town. Around 9:30 a.m, though, something surreal happened: A massive streak of light seared across the sky.
For a moment, it even grew brighter than the sun as it silently bloomed like a burning flower. After a few seconds, though, an explosion followed—shattering glass windows in buildings and cars, and rupturing peoples’ ear drums. The boom was so large that the roof of a nearby zinc factory collapsed entirely.
The explosion sent nearly 1,500 people to the hospitals for injuries including glass cuts, flash blindness, and even ultraviolet burns due to the light. It also damaged more than 7,200 buildings. The culprit, as researchers later found out, was a comet roughly 20 meters wide. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about it aside from the damage and injuries it caused to the city was that it went largely undetected by astronomers and asteroid surveyors on the ground.
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