Fire in the Sky

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Comet fragment or Indian rocket launch? Eerie light seen in the night sky from all over eastern Australia

Anna Hartley
ABC, Australia
Mon, 22 Jul 2019 20:19 UTC

An astronomer has explained a strange, bright light that appeared in skies over the Northern Territory and Queensland on Monday night, leaving hundreds of people mystified.

Shauna Royes spotted the light over the Julia Creek caravan park in remote north-west Queensland about 7.30pm on Monday night and put a call out to the ABC North West Facebook page to figure out what it was.

"We were actually at the caravan park having a bush dinner for not-for-profit organisations, so there was about 160 people, and one of the tourists looked up and said, 'look'," the McKinlay Shire Councillor said.

"It was quite a bright, unusual light with a tail on it. It was travelling north-east and we watched it for probably two or three minutes before it faded out.

"We had no idea what it was. It was really unusual."

Comment: Actually, that's the power of suggestion. It is not yet known that what they saw was the Indian rocket exiting the atmosphere...

Eyewitnesses captured footage of it with their phone cameras, some of which are posted in the comments here.

ANOTHER meteor fireball seen from across Florida - Second such event in two weeks

Amanda Holly
WFLA
Fri, 19 Jul 2019 18:48 UTC

Video of a bright meteor streaking across the sky came in to the WFLA newsroom early Friday morning. WFLA viewer Rick Gallas was able to capture the video of the meteor on his security cameras at 11:27 pm Thursday night. This is looking east but he is not the only one who saw this meteor.

Rick may have been one of the only ones to capture the meteor on video but plenty of people saw it. Twitter has numerous reports of the meteor being seen all across Florida.

The meteor was so bright that the global lightning mapper on the GOES East satellite displayed it at a lightning strike near Orlando!

Comment: It's raining steadily now. And still the masses sleep!

Meteor or 'space junk'? Something broke apart in the sky over South Florida

Boom heard, felt across four western Illinois counties - Remains mystery

Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree
Jacksonville Journal-Courier
Fri, 19 Jul 2019 04:53 UTC

What's certain is that dozens of people across at least four counties heard a loud boom or felt a shaking Thursday afternoon.

What's a mystery is where it originated.

Emergency and law enforcement agencies in Greene, Morgan, Scott and Pike counties received numerous reports of a loud, explosion-like sound that shook the ground and buildings about 1 p.m. Thursday.

Some who felt it quickly took to social media looking for clues. Although there were a few erroneous reports of explosions, most people were left scratching their heads.

"It sounded like a jet or something that blew up," Joe Harwick of White Hall said. "It echoed for some time."

Greene County Chief Deputy Cale Hoesman said there were reports about the sound, but the source could not be verified.

Comment: There have been several reports of these mysterious booms in the past few weeks:

These events are probably due to the dramatic increase in space rocks flying over our heads. To learn more about our changing near-space environment and humanity's role in it, read "Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection" by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.

Loud boom of unknown origin shakes homes in south Texas

Vanessa Croix
KENS 5
Thu, 11 Jul 2019 23:42 UTC

Neighbors from La Vernia to Karnes City reported hearing a loud boom Wednesday afternoon on social media.

While many people are speculating as to what it may have been, right now the loud boom continues to remain a mystery.

Wilson County authorities said they began getting calls into dispatch reporting the boom around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. Sisters Bailey and Molly Runty were at home in their home in Adkins when they heard it.

"We were just sitting in the room, and then we just heard it and then I started freaking out," Bailey said.

The girls described the boom as being so huge that it shook their house.

Comment: Dr. David Wood, an astronomy professor with San Antonio College, reported to Wilson County News that the mysterious 'sonic' boom likely came from a exploding meteor:

"Given how wide-ranging this sound was, a bolide is the most likely culprit," Wood told the Wilson County News.

Bolides are large meteors that explode in the earth's atmosphere.

At night, these appear as fireballs in the sky, Wood explained, but at midday, "it would be much less noticeable."

In February 2013, a large bolide entered earth's atmosphere over Russia as a very visible fireball. "The percussive effect broke windows and caused injuries to people on the ground," Wood said.

What Texans experienced last Wednesday could have been a bolide, according to Wood, although he couldn't say definitively.

"We do get hit all the time [by these]," he said. "They're usually much smaller."

There's "a lot of junk in earth's orbit," the professor said, adding that 1,747 fireball sightings were recorded in the last 30 days.

Meteors, he explained, can enter earth's atmosphere at about 50,000 mph. If it was small, say a few meters in diameter, and exploded very high — 80 to 100 kilometers, or about 60 miles — above the earth, a bolide might have avoided detection.

"All the evidence seems to really point that direction," Wood said.

Very rare meteor cluster recorded in Maranhão, Brazil

Marcelo Zurita
Bramonmeteor.org
Sun, 07 Jul 2019 06:24 UTC

A very rare cluster of meteors was registered in the early hours of June 26 from the BRAMON EMM2/MA Station managed by Edgar Merizio in São José do Ribamar, Maranhão, Brazil. Where at least 9 meteors registered simultaneously in less than 1 second, all parallel to each other.

Meteor cluster like these originate from the same meteoroid that broke apart before it hit Earth. Usually this fragmentation occurs a few hours, perhaps days, before its encounter with the terrestrial atmosphere.

Meteor fireball streaks across Australian skies

Albert McKnight
Magnet News
Sat, 06 Jul 2019 19:32 UTC

© Screenshot YouTube
A screenshot from a YouTube video that is reportedly of the meteor that flew across the South East sky on the night of July 5.

Social media is buzzing with reports of a meteor spotted over the South Coast on Friday night.

On the Facebook group Australian Meteor Reports, administrator David Finlay said the meteor was spotted about 9pm on July 5 and believed it had come to ground somewhere in Victoria.

"I have reports of sonics from Forest Hill (Melbourne) to Mallacoota Vic. That's a distance of 400km. I've never heard of sonics being reported so far apart," he said in a Facebook post to the group.

He said sightings had been reported from as far north as Sydney and Orange.

"From these reports, and as long as this object was over land and not the ocean, I'm already predicting there are now meteorites on the ground somewhere in Victoria from this fall," he said.

Meteor or 'space junk'? Something broke apart in the sky over South Florida

Scott Sutton
abcactionnews.com
Wed, 03 Jul 2019 13:12 UTC

Was it a meteor, a comet, space junk falling to Earth or something else?

Whatever it was, residents across Florida took to social media to show photos and video of a large fireball streaking across the sky early Wednesday morning.

From Deerfield Beach to Vero Beach, Scripps Station WPTV in West Palm Beach received calls and emails from people who were perplexed by the strange object.

Grace Theodore said she was walking out of a Walmart in Deerfield Beach around 2:19 a.m. when she recorded video of what she called a "double meteor."

Comment: According to the American Meteor Society (which cites the US Air Force), this was not a meteor fireball but rather space debris reentry - possibly CZ-3B R/B, a Chinese satellite launched in 2015.

Mysterious bangs, flashes over NSW, Australia sky likely a meteor

Yahoo! News - Australia
Sun, 30 Jun 2019 20:41 UTC

Residents in northern NSW were a little shaken up on Sunday evening when a series of loud bangs was heard coming from the sky.

"It sounded like a bomb dropping actually but there was a zooming sound and small sonic boom, I thought it was made by a fast military jet," one person wrote on Facebook on the strange noises around 5pm.

"Heard it in Lismore and it shook the house! Pretty awesome sound," another person added. One person even wrote that they saw an "amazing glow over the roof line" as well as the strange noise. "Heard it Nimbin shook my walls," another Facebook user chimed in. 'The windows shook'

Dave Reneke from Australasian Sky and Space Magazine, confirmed to ABC that the mysterious noise was most likely a meteor burning and breaking up as it headed toward earth. "It sounded like a big fire cracker going off, but the windows shook," he said.

Astronomers spotted a car-size asteroid just hours before it exploded over Puerto Rico

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Thu, 27 Jun 2019 16:31 UTC

Astronomers discovered a car-size asteroid hours before it slammed into Earth and burned up in the atmosphere this past weekend, news sources report.

Scientists in Hawaii initially spotted the asteroid, named 2019 MO, on Saturday (June 22). Soon after, the heavenly traveller broke apart in large fireball as it hit the atmosphere about 240 miles (380 kilometers) south of San Juan, Puerto Rico, according to the University of Hawaii.

This is only the fourth time in history that scientists have spotted an asteroid so close to impact. The other three detections all occurred within the past 11 years, including 2008 TC3, 2014 AA and 2018 LA, which landed as a meteorite in southern Africa just 7 hours after it was noticed by scientists.

Unlike 2018 LA, Earth's latest visitor was harmless and didn't make it to the ground. But the asteroid, 13 feet (4 meters) long, still made a spectacular fireball that was equivalent to about 6,000 tons of exploding TNT, according to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which is run by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.

The asteroid's impact was so powerful, even satellites in orbit spotted it. Satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recorded its impact and destruction at 5:25 p.m. EDT (21:25 UTC), as you can see on this tweet below.

Comment: As Fireball Numbers Increase it is well worth remembering what can come out of the sky, without any warning at all:

Mysterious 'loud boom' heard over small English town spooks residents

Sputnik
Thu, 27 Jun 2019 19:12 UTC

The bang was powerful enough to trigger car alarms and left houses and office blocks shaking, and instantly sparked a debate online over its cause.

Derbyshire Police have revealed that the loud explosion heard in Derby city and the surrounding countryside area on Thursday morning was a sonic boom caused by a Royal Air Force (RAF) jet.

According to the authorities, the RAF Typhoon jet triggered the "loud bang" while moving at high speed to intercept an Air India flight from Mumbai to Newark after receiving a "security alert."

Comment: The BBC posted footage of the 'sonic boom':

Claire Murray said she was filming her dog in her garden in Breaston, near Long Eaton, between 09:45 and 10:00 when she heard the noise.

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LindaMay Have you been keeping an eye on what's been going on? It's liken to the Gun fight at the O.K Corral. I'm chuckling my tits off.

Winternights2

HVACTech Buzz Lightyear is so yesterday.

Winternights2

Rincewind So glad you popped in. Tiresome hey, so why are you so animated, if there's nothing to get upset about? Bored are we.

Winternights2

Boris, I don't know whether to feel sorry for him, or fall off my chair chuckling. So PM, careful what we say. The measure of his metal, will be...

Winternights2

Good Optics "you simply won't hear from me", I just did. Make your mind up. I did like and chuckle at your Freudian slip, "simply", about sums you...

Winternights2

Fire in the Sky

Comet fragment or Indian rocket launch? Eerie light seen in the night sky from all over eastern Australia

ANOTHER meteor fireball seen from across Florida - Second such event in two weeks

Boom heard, felt across four western Illinois counties - Remains mystery

Loud boom of unknown origin shakes homes in south Texas

Very rare meteor cluster recorded in Maranhão, Brazil

Meteor fireball streaks across Australian skies

Meteor or 'space junk'? Something broke apart in the sky over South Florida

Mysterious bangs, flashes over NSW, Australia sky likely a meteor

Astronomers spotted a car-size asteroid just hours before it exploded over Puerto Rico

Mysterious 'loud boom' heard over small English town spooks residents

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