Fire in the Sky

Second large meteor fireball exploded over Portland, Oregon in one month, 23 November 2013

komonews.com
Sun, 29 Dec 2013 06:11 UTC

A strange, fiery sight spotted in the skies over the Willamette Valley Wednesday morning caused quite the buzz, with initial reports suggesting perhaps a meteor or burning space junk.

Jim Todd, Planetarium Manager at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry says original photos suggested to him it might have been a meteor fireball, but he has since seen additional photos that suggest it was instead a jet contrail that created an optical illusion by reflecting light from the rising sun.

A number of residents snapped photos of the scene, and KATU photojournalist Mike Warner also took a short video of the trail while he was flying in their station's helicopter. He said he and the helicopter pilot were over Interstate 205 at the Clackamas Town Center between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. and spotted the odd sight while looking east.

According to U.S. Strategic Command, no man-made objects reentered the atmosphere in our area on Wednesday, which excluded the possibility that some space junk fell to earth.

Comment: See also: Fireball seen over Portland, Oregon, 30 October 2013

Reader Comments

sass · 2013-12-29T08:36:40Z

These fireballs seem mostly be in southern USA - anyone got an explanation or diagram indicating where the ort cloud will/is impact/ing? It's the USA is it, that general location? I haven't heard any info on this specifically, but seeing the trajectory on that little sott film it seems there might be a concentration of impacting rocks - guess that's got to hit somewhere.

carefix · 2013-12-29T09:19:18Z

At first sight..

At first sight would incline towards the contrail view of this event... however at 0:26 seconds one can see a bright object in front of and inline with the trail direction which is blurred - as though moving fast. This could be a significant fireball - or a fairly insignificant one by the standards of today. It is now very obvious that there has been an exponential rise in fireball reports over the past few years. While some of this might perhaps be due to an increase in reporting it seems to be a mostly real effect to me. If so the big question is where are these objects coming from? The fact that the increase has taken years and the sizes of these objects is increasing as shown by the increase in associated bangs, booms and visible fragmentation components it does seem that the solar system is entering some kind of debris field. OK maybe a significant event occured in the Oort cloud decades ago and this junk is only just begining to reach the inner solar system - but if it is not that then we are heading into a debris field. The problem with such a field is that it could contain a huge amount of debris and the number and sizes of meteors will increase exponentially for some time. This is because there is no large body associated with the field that we are aware of that would help concentrate these space rocks in a smaller self gravitating region of space. OK I am getting rather speculative, but if it is not the aftermath of a local event then maybe it is the remains of a solar system that failed to develop sufficiently but still has enough, albeit dispersed, matter to maintain a worrying concentration of space rocks. To me the ramp up in these events is a little too fast for the more worrying hypothesis.

At the moment there is no sign of the increase in the number of fibreball events slowing down. I would kind of expect to see a Gaussian temporal distribution with either suggested cause but different timescales. At the moment all we seem to have is an exponential increase. If this flattens out or begins to flatten out within a few year then this is likely to be a local event. If the exponential rise in the number of these event continues for a decade we have big problems.

Tangential link: the FBI is investigating the Baltimore bridge. They will make sure nothing is found. [Link]

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Fire in the Sky

Second large meteor fireball exploded over Portland, Oregon in one month, 23 November 2013

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