It's confirmed: The hottest rock ever discovered in Earth's crust really was super-hot.

The rock, a fist-sized piece of black glass, was discovered in 2011 and first reported in 2017, when scientists wrote in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters that it had been formed in temperatures reaching 4,298 degrees Fahrenheit (2,370 degrees Celsius), hotter than much of the Earth's mantle. Now, a new analysis of minerals from the same site reveals that this record-scorching heat was real.

The rocks melted and reformed in a meteorite impact about 36 million years ago in what is today Labrador, Canada. The impact formed the 17-mile-wide (28 kilometers) Mistastin crater, where Michael Zanetti, then a doctoral student at Washington University St. Louis, picked up the glassy rock during a Canadian Space Agency-funded study of how to coordinate astronauts and rovers working together to explore another planet or moon. (Mistastin crater looks a lot like a moon crater and is often used as a stand-in for such research.)

The chance find turned out to be an important one. An analysis of the rock revealed that it contained zircons, extremely durable minerals that crystallize under high heat. The structure of zircons can show how hot it was when they formed.

But to confirm the initial findings, researchers needed to date more than one zircon. In the new study, lead author Gavin Tolometti, a postdoctoral researcher at Western University in Canada, and colleagues analyzed four more zircons in samples from the crater. These samples came from different types of rocks in different locations, giving a more comprehensive view of how the impact heated the ground. One was from a glassy rock formed in the impact, two others from rocks that melted and resolidified, and one from a sedimentary rock that held fragments of glass formed in the impact.

A bright fireball was observed by a network of all-sky cameras across southern Ontario at 11:37pm on Sunday, April 17, 2022. Analysis of the video data suggests that fragments of the meteor are likely to have made it to the ground near the eastern shore of Lake Simcoe, just north of the town of Argyle.

We received 25 reports about a fireball seen over Bayern, Berlin, Brandenburg, Dolnośląskie, Hessen, Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Liberec Region, Niedersachsen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and Saxony on Sunday, April 17th 2022 around 19:46 UT.

For this event, we received one video and 5 photos.

A fireball was recorded by the south camera of the Monte Catelo Monitoring Station - SC (BRAMON) around 00:47 on 04/13/2022.

It is estimated that the glow started over the Municipality of Curitibanos/SC and disappeared about 2 seconds later near Anita Garibaldi/SC.


(Translated by Google)

We received 6 reports about a fireball seen over British Columbia and WA on Tuesday, April 12th 2022 around 07:15 UT.

For this event, we received 2 videos.

We received 88 reports about a fireball seen over England and Wales on Wednesday, April 13th 2022 around 23:46 UT.

For this event, we received 2 videos and 2 photos.

We received one report about a fireball seen over MN on Monday, April 11th 2022 around 01:45 UT.

For this event, we received one video.

Classified data prevented scientists from verifying their discovery for 3 years.
A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo(opens in new tab) released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC).

The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv.

That 2019 study argued that the wee meteor's speed, along with the trajectory of its orbit, proved with 99% certainty that the object had originated far beyond our solar system — possibly "from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy," the authors wrote. But despite their near certainty, the team's paper was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, as some of the data needed to verify their calculations was considered classified by the U.S. government, according to Vice (opens in new tab).

Now, USSC scientists have officially confirmed the team's findings. In a memo dated March 1 and shared on Twitter on April 6, Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the USSC, wrote that the 2019 analysis of the fireball was "sufficiently accurate to confirm an interstellar trajectory."

We received 258 reports about a fireball seen over IA, IL, IN, MI, MN, MO, SD and WI on Sunday, April 10th 2022 around 01:39 UT.

For this event, we received 3 videos and one photo.

We received 15 reports about a fireball seen over IN, OH, Ontario, PA, VA and WV on Friday, April 8th 2022 around 08:52 UT.

For this event, we received 2 videos and one photo.