Home > Megaton

It is also used as a unit of energy, approximately equivalent to the energy released in the detonation of this amount of TNT. A kiloton is one-thousandth of a megaton -- approximately equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT. The megaton has traditionally been used to rate the energy output, and hence destructive power, of nuclear weapons. More recently, it has been used to describe the energy released in other highly destructive events, such as asteroid impacts.

A megaton is defined as:

• 10¹⁵ calories
• 4.2 x 10¹⁵ joule = 4.2 PJ ( petajoule)

The Little Boy weapon dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of approximately 13 kilotons. Thus, a megaton is equivalent to roughly 77 Hiroshima bombs.

The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba, which had a yield of 57 megatons.

The impact of a roughly kilometre-wide meteorite with the Earth can yield upward of 10 million megatons. Such impacts have been hypothesized to be the cause of prehistoric extinction eventAn extinction event (also extinction-level event ELE is a period in time when a large number of species die out. The normal background rate of extinctions is about two to five families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Since lifs.

See also

• 1 E15 JTo help compare different orders of magnitude we list here energies between 1015 joules and 1016 joules. Weaker energies 3. 6 × 1015 J 1 TWh 4. 184 × 1015 J energy released by explosion of 1 megaton of TNT Stronger energies External links Orders of magnit for comparisons with other energies.