This Friday, about 15 hours apart, two rare events occured:

A 15 meters meteor exploded above Russia A 50 meters meteorite missed Earth by less than 20,000 miles

Astronomers claim that both events are unrelated, because the meteorites in question were flying in opposite directions (South to North vs. North to South).

Here I claim that the 2 events are related, and that indeed, we are dealing with two fragments of the same space rock (the Russian explosion is NOT a test nuke from some rogue entity).

1. The probabilities do not make sense

The first event is said to happen every 100 years. The second every 40 years. Thus, if unrelated, the chance that (1) and (2) occur on a same year is 0.025%. The chance that they occur on a same day is 0.000068%. The chance that in your lifetime, you see such a coincidence is about 75 times higher. Now the chance that any kind of extremely rare event occur during your lifetime is actually very high, but that's another story.

One might suspect that some of the above numbers are wrong: maybe 15, 50, 40 or 100 is wrong, thus making this coincidence far more likely than it seems at first glance. However, I believe that these numbers are accurate enough to make the probability incredibly small, and I persist with my belief that indeed, the two events are thus related. Read below for my explanation.

2. Look at the graph below

The fact that both rocks were flying in total opposite directions actually makes perfect sense! Below A and B represent respectively the smaller and larger space rocks. Metorites are known to break due to tidal (gravitional) forces when approaching large bodies (Sun or Jupiter - or it might have happened long ago).

The graph speaks for itself.

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