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It's because of the asteroid's kinetic energy. Think of it like this. Even though an asteroid can be relatively small (10 meters across), it moves at an average speed of 25 kilometers per second, or about 15.5342798 miles per second. Now, that alone might not seem like much. However, once you calculate the kinetic energy, or the collision energy in this case, you'll see why. The "average" asteroid is about 10 km across with a mass of 1.47 x 10^21 kg. So, after figuring it's kinetic energy, (1/2)mv^2, we find it has a collision energy of 9.1875x10^27 joules, equal to 109,375,000,000,000 of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki.

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