meteoroid

As they hurtle towards Earth, air forces itself inside the meteoroid, increasing the pressure and causing it to explode from the inside out.

Larger meteoroids, like the roughly 55-foot diameter Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013, go through a similar yet even more destructive process.

Half a century earlier, Whipple himself had determined the orbit of the meteoroids by photographing the paths of the meteors against the sky.

This suggests that some catastrophe hit the asteroid in the recent past and made so many meteoroids that they continue to delight meteor observers today.

So that was actually good news then, but other kinds of leaks are mostly thought to be caused by micro meteoroids.