The Chelyabinsk Meteor: The Day a Second Sun Rose Over Russia

On a freezing February morning in 2013, a second, impossibly bright sun streaked across the Russian sky, followed by a blinding flash and minutes of eerie silence. Then an invisible wall of energy shattered a city. Every detail of that morning was entirely real.This episode unpacks the staggering physics of the Chelyabinsk meteor, an 18-meter, 10,000-ton rock that exploded with the force of about 30 Hiroshima bombs. It is a story about how our atmosphere protects us, the human heroics it inspired, and the sobering realization of our vulnerability to the cosmos.Why the meteor was invisible to telescopes: its radiant sat in the glare of the rising sunRam pressure and the air burst about 30 kilometers up that spared the city belowThe deadly silent gap that drew people to windows just before the shockwave blew out glass in over 7,200 buildingsTeacher Yulia Karbysheva's duck-and-cover order that protected all 44 of her studentsThe cosmic coincidence of asteroid Duende's predicted flyby just 16 hours later