Layers and layers…
If you read the Daily Mail piece about the Chelyabinsk meteor fall, don't read the "So What Is A Meteorite" sidebar if you prefer accuracy with your facts.
Let's break 'er down:
Meteorites are small pieces of rocky debris that have been captured by the Earth's gravity, pulling them from their paths through space and bringing them crashing down to Earth.
Yeah…okay…sorta.
Most are fragments of asteroids that have been shattered by collisions with other asteroids, although some are pieces of Mars or the Moon which have been thrown into space after asteroid collisions with these bodies.
Of the meteorites which have been collected and identified, almost all are fragments of asteroids and very, very few are pieces of Mars and the Moon. While you can find chunks of the asteroid belt anywhere on Earth, you have to go to remote deserts or Antarctica if you want to find pieces of the Moon or Mars. The reasons are statistical and physical: there are orders of magnitude more asteroids in the solar system than there are planets and moons and it's much easier, due to the parent object's gravity (or lack thereof), to knock a chunk of an asteroid into an Earth-crossing orbit. You have to go to remote deserts or Antartica to find Martian and Lunar meteorites for the simple reason that they are easier to spot in those environments. You generally don't see rocks just sitting around out in the middle of the desert or an Antarctic ice field, so when you do see one, there's a higher probability that it's a meteorite. If it's a green-looking rock (as was ALH 84001, one of the most famous meteorites ever found) the probability that it came from Mars is even higher.
[They] vary in age depending on their sources.
Meteorites from asteroids are around 4.5billion years old.
Meteorites from the Moon are older than 2.5billion years and meteorites from Mars may be as young as 65million years
Again, yeah…sorta… Though ALH 84001 may be as young 16 million years.
Meteorites are distinct from meteoroids, which are smaller. When meteorites plow into the Earth's atmosphere they produce a brief flash of light, known as a meteor.
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! A meteroid is "a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom", a meteor is the light that object emits as it moves through Earth's atmosphere, and a meteorite is what remains of that object on the ground. As I interpret their meanings, a bolide (greek for "spear") is a class of meteor which looks like a sustained streak and leaves a smoke trail, and a fireball is a class of meteor which is a distinct and sustained ball of light moving across the sky. (Watch this if you want to see one of the most famous fireballs in history.)
The dumbest thing about the above two sentences from the sidebar is that the reporter who wrote the main story got the meteoroid/meteor/meteorite distinctions correct.
These were originally thought to be weather phenomena – hence the term meteorology for the study of weather.
Yet another case of "sorta accurate". "Meteorology" was originally the ""treatise on celestial phenomena, discussion of high things". Today's meteorology makes a distinction between the upper atmosphere and space. Through the 19th century, that wasn't so much the case. The Earth's upper atmosphere and what we think of as outer space consisted of a medium called the "ether" and meteors (along with comets, lightning, and other transient phenomenon seen high in the sky) were "emanations" in the ether. IOW, the entire context for the "discussion of high things" change in the early 20th c., so to say that meteors were "originally thought to be weather phenomena" isn't quite right.
The impact of a comet or asteroid 65million years ago is thought to have caused, or at least contributed to, the extinction of around three-quarters of all species living on Earth at the time – including the dinosaurs.
Yes.
There have been no recorded deaths due to a meteorite fall.
No. There have been no deaths due to a meteorite fall as confirmed and recorded by a credentialed Western authority. There are, on the other hand, numerous accounts of death-by-meteorite in ancient records. One of the more dramatic examples is said to have occurred in 1490 in China's Shanxi Province where 10,000 people are purported to have been killed. The trouble with meteorite strike confirmations up until about the mid-20th century was this lingering notion of ethereal "emanations". Meteors and comets were said to have been, at the most, loose agglomerations of particulates (sand, maybe). Even the great Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said, "I would more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven". The idea that impacts from solid celestial objects is common didn't really gel until the atomic age when the late great Gene Shoemaker compared the craters left after nuclear tests to the craters on the Moon.
A dog was, however, reputedly killed by the fall of the Nakhla martian meteorite in Egypt in 1911.
The story of the vaporized Nakhla dog is considered apocryphal among astronomers.
One more thing: within the body of the Daily Mail story, the very first sentence makes it seem as though the damage and injuries in Chelyabinsk was caused by chunks of the meteor falling on the town. This is highly unlikely. The more likely cause of all of the damage and injuries was the shockwave from the mid-air explosion of the meteor.
But you don't have to take my word for it — read, Rain of Iron and Ice, by John S. Lewis.
[UPDATE]
One of the videos of the meteor fall shows a burning crater at the end. It is not from the meteor, it's supposedly a known gas crater (whatever that is) in Turkmenistan.
Also, from the Daily Mail story:
According to an unconfirmed report in Russia Today, the meteorite was intercepted by Russian air defense.
[...]
According to RT.com, the Urals regional centre of the Emergency Ministry claimed it sent out a mass text message warning residents about a possible meteorite shower.
As to the first sentence, they may as well have claimed that Vladimir Putin shot it down in his personal Su-27 before his daily bear wrestling workout. And the second seems just about as likely.
