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Fire in the SkyS
The space rock was about 2 feet in diameter and weighed more than 100 pounds. When it hit the Earth's atmosphere last week, it shone, briefly, 20 times brighter than the moon.
NASA's cameras captured the meteor as it zipped over the Southeast United States on Wednesday. In the video above, you can watch as it comes soaring through the sky and explodes in a flash of light.
The steady orb of light in the left of the frame is the moon.
Italians in the north east are on the hunt for traces of a fireball which raced across the sky in the early hours of Tuesday morning and "unsettled pets".
The ball of fire, thought to be a meteorite, was spotted between 2.30am and 2.45am and accompanied by a loud bang and thunder-like roar, Il Gazzettino reported.
It was spotted by locals across the north east, including people in Venice and Padua. One local resident told Il Gazzettino the event had "unsettled his pets".
Perplexed residents called the fire brigade and police duly went on a hunt for the extraterrestrial, but failed to find any traces of a meteorite.
The ball of fire, thought to be a meteorite, was spotted between 2.30am and 2.45am and accompanied by a loud bang and thunder-like roar, Il Gazzettino reported.
It was spotted by locals across the north east, including people in Venice and Padua. One local resident told Il Gazzettino the event had "unsettled his pets".
Perplexed residents called the fire brigade and police duly went on a hunt for the extraterrestrial, but failed to find any traces of a meteorite.
© UnknownNewly Discovered Asteroid Flies By Earth
But even if the asteroid, named 2013 RG, had encountered our planet, it would likely have burned up in the atmosphere, as falling celestial bodies less than 10 meters in diameter tend to do.
The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, in Russia's southern Ural Mountains, in February was estimated to be more than twice as large: 17 to 20 meters in diameter.
Both space rocks are believed to be part of the Apollo group of asteroids, which regularly cross into Earth's orbit. Eleven more "close approaches" are expected this month, said the US-based Minor Planet Center, which announced the newfound asteroid's flyby.
The asteroid was first noticed by Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Observatory and then confirmed by astronomers in New Zealand and Bulgaria. It flew by Earth at a distance of about 220,000 kilometers (140,000 miles) around 10:30 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.
© cheslav.livejournal.com
Photos and videos of the object posted online have provoked a debate on Russian social networks, with various ideas offered for what it might be.
"I was sitting in my car. I did not start taking pictures immediately - first I did not pay attention. It was flying soundless," said one Internet user, who posted several photos of the event.
Initial Meteor Sighting Reports
25 August 2013 - Denise Totah, Lubbock, Texas 5:00 a.m.
5 maybe 10 seconds duration, travelling from west to east, my right to left. I was facing west. I thought it was a flash of lightning at first. I turned to look up and saw this big flash of light and it looked like it had 2 contrails at the end. I thought that maybe a plane had exploded, but there was no sound. It was a little brighter than the moon. It looked like 2 trails coming from it after it started disappearing. I didn't get a picture, I just know that the flash was bright enough to make me look up to the sky cause I thought it was lightning.Thomas Ashcraft - Heliotown - New Mexico writes,
"Did anyone catch a large fireball on Aug 25 2013 at 0954:50 UT in the west Texas- eastern New Mexico vicinity? (0354:50 am MDT / 0454:50 am CDT) I caught a flash behind clouds which might have come from over the horizon in which case this fireball would have been deeper into north central Texas. It should show on space fence radar for Texas observers. It made a 30 second radio reflection at 217 MHz and a two minute reflection on tv forward scatter frequencies."Sue Davis said...
I saw something go across the sky and catch on fire and slow down to almost a stop as it seemingly entered our atmosphere.. then it shot across sky and seemed to disappear... never seen anything like that. It was witnessed at 1:39 a.m. August 25, 2013 in Brazoria County Texas right outside of the town Angleton.
NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has upgraded its estimates of a major fireball that exploded over the southeastern USA on August 28th. Lead researcher Bill Cooke says " the fireball reached a peak magnitude of -13, brighter than a Full Moon, and cast shadows on the ground. This indicates that the meteoroid had a mass of over 50 kg (110 lbs) and was about 40 cm (16 inches) in diameter. It hit the top of Earth's atmosphere traveling 23.7 km/s (53,000 mph)."
"As far as I know, this is the brightest event our network has observed in 5 years of operation," he continues. "There are reports of sonic booms reaching the ground, and data from 4 doppler radars indicate that some meteorites may have fallen along the fireball's ground track." (Note: The city in the ground track map is Cleveland, Tennessee, not Cleveland, Ohio.)
Using data from multiple cameras, Cooke has calculated a preliminary orbit for the meteoroid. The shape and dimensions of the orbit are similar those of a Jupiter-family comet. If meteorites are recovered from the Tennessee countryside, their chemical composition will tell researchers more about the origin of the fireball.
© Google Earth/lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com
© Unknown
A study of its composition showed the space rock had undergone "intensive melting" before entering Earth's atmosphere and streaking over the central Russia's Chelyabinsk region in a blinding fireball, they said in a statement.
This "almost certainly" points to a near-miss with the Sun, or a collision with another body in the solar system - possibly a planet or asteroid, said study co-author Victor Sharygin from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geology and Mineralogy.
A green light "brighter than the day" and lasting three seconds was reported by pilots and witnesses on the ground. The official Twitter account of Spain's Air Traffic Control (@controladores) was the first to break the news, according to The Huffington Post.
"Various aircraft over the north of the Canary Islands just reported a bright light, lasting 3 seconds, as if it was daytime," it tweeted.
It then added: "From the descriptions given by pilots it was probably a meteorite. Even so, protocols oblige that the military be informed" Witnesses described the phenomenon as "a white light coming down, with a long tail, falling."
Javier Licandro, of the Canaries Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), told the press that it was most likely a meteoroid of the kind that broke up in the atmosphere, rather than a meteorite which survives contact with the ground.
Nevertheless, he did not discount the possibility that it was the remains of an old satellite. Licandro said that he would check the data recorded by the observatories on La Palma and Tenerife to see if they had registered the phenomenon.
Twitter was soon full of people describing what they had seen.
@German_Herrera1 wrote: "I saw it from my house in La Laguna, a green light lasting three seconds. Impressive!"
There has so far been no official explanation given.
"Various aircraft over the north of the Canary Islands just reported a bright light, lasting 3 seconds, as if it was daytime," it tweeted.
It then added: "From the descriptions given by pilots it was probably a meteorite. Even so, protocols oblige that the military be informed" Witnesses described the phenomenon as "a white light coming down, with a long tail, falling."
Javier Licandro, of the Canaries Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), told the press that it was most likely a meteoroid of the kind that broke up in the atmosphere, rather than a meteorite which survives contact with the ground.
Nevertheless, he did not discount the possibility that it was the remains of an old satellite. Licandro said that he would check the data recorded by the observatories on La Palma and Tenerife to see if they had registered the phenomenon.
Twitter was soon full of people describing what they had seen.
@German_Herrera1 wrote: "I saw it from my house in La Laguna, a green light lasting three seconds. Impressive!"
There has so far been no official explanation given.
Virginia Beach - From the Outer Banks to York County, people reported their homes shaking, things falling off the walls and even hearing odd sounds. We asked about it on the WVEC13 Facebook page and hundreds of people talked about what they experienced around 8:00 a.m.
Jennifer Goyet posted, "I was in my garage and I did not feel it BUT I heard it. Sounds like something bumped into my garage door from the wind but I looked and no wind."
"Hampton got three loud rumbles about a minute or two apart. Didn't feel like a quake but a trash truck or thunder," posted Ketie Martines.
Kimberly O'Connor Melnyk wrote, "I live 1/2 a mile from the court house in Virginia Beach. My house shook, and a few seconds later, it shook again."
"Hampton got three loud rumbles about a minute or two apart. Didn't feel like a quake but a trash truck or thunder," posted Ketie Martines.
Kimberly O'Connor Melnyk wrote, "I live 1/2 a mile from the court house in Virginia Beach. My house shook, and a few seconds later, it shook again."
Comment: We have heard the bogus linking of meteors to rocket launches before:
Spectacular Russian rocket launch - more evidence of comet dust loading our atmosphere