Comets


Fireball 5

Loud blast recorded on dashcam as meteorite explodes over Sarawak, Indonesia - Locals felt earth shake

Fireball sonic Boom
© The Star
Kota Kinabalu: The mysterious explosion heard by many in Sipitang, Labuan, Lawas (Sarawak), and parts close to these areas on Sunday (Jan 31) could have been a sonic boom or a meteorite which exploded in mid-air.

The Astronomical Society of Brunei Darussalam (PABD) said it received numerous reports from Bruneians who also heard the mysterious loud noise.

The PABD then issued a notice seeking eyewitness accounts of the phenomenon, which is believed to have occurred at about 11am.

Some Bruneians later shared their experiences and uploaded blurry pictures of what appears to be a fireball trailing smoke to PABD's Facebook page.

Comment: Dashcam footage of the event has just emerged on Twitter:




Fireball 5

Meteor fireball lights up Northern Hungarian skies

Meteor over Hungary
© Daily News Hungray
Thanks to a lucky camera position, the following video captures a fireball flashing over Sokorópátka. According to HVG, an unexpected meteor crossed the sky in Sokorópátka, Győr-Moson-Sopron County this week. One of the users of Időkép, Károly Boráros, sent a video to the portal, as his camera was looking right in the direction of the fireball.

A commenter on YouTube wrote that the meteor could also be seen from eastern Poland. He noticed it at 2 AM as he looked out the window at the landscape, but because of the sudden brightness he didn't know how to identify the phenomenon.

Fireball 5

Best of the Web: HUGE meteor fireball lights up southern China's dark morning skies

Fireball over Yushu City
© WeiboThis shot of the meteor was taken from a plane.
A suspected low-flying meteor has lit up the sky in northwestern China's Yushu City on December 23.

Video from the event in the city in China's Qinghai Province showed a bright fireball streaking across and lighting the dark sky.

According to reports, the fireball was probably a bolide and it might have dropped several meteorite fragments somewhere in the area.

A bolide is a very bright meteor.

Comment: The Daily Mail provides a few more details of the awesome event:
In another piece of footage, the burning object is seen descending quickly towards hills and fields.

In a third clip, the fireball becomes brighter and bigger as it approaches the ground.

Dan Ba, a local, said he witnessed the fireball while taking his child to school.

'It started very small, but three minutes later it became very big and bright,' the parent told Pear Video.
fireball china decemeber 2020
Yu Jun, chief writer of Chinese science website Guokr, told Beijing News that the fireball looked like a bolide, which is a very bright meteor.

The Nanxiang County Government told Red Star News that it had heard of the matter but was unclear of the details.
It brings to mind the spectacular fireball that roared through Russia's skies on February 15th, 2013, which SOTT reported on at the time: Fireball explodes over Russian city: Widespread panic and structural damage, Thousand people injured

Although there have been a great many smaller events since then, as recorded in our Fire In The Sky section.

See also: Something Wicked This Way Comes

And check out SOTT radio's: More footage and data is emerging on Twitter:






Christmas Lights

Stunning light pillars illuminate night sky in Chinese city

Light pillars in China
© Pear Video

Residents in a northern Chinese city have been stunned by a spectacular optical phenomenon illuminating in the night sky.

Incredible footage shows dozens of colourful light beams appearing on Saturday evening in Inner Mongolia region's Genhe, a city dubbed 'China's pole of cold'.

Millions of social media users were also left in awe at the extraordinary scene, known as light pillars or sun pillars, caused by a bright light source reflected off falling ice crystals in cold weather.


Info

Follow-up on recent NEO objects

Below you can find a selection of some objects for which we recently made follow-up observations at the "Osservatorio Salvatore di Giacomo, Agerola, ITALY" (MPC code L07; Observers E. Guido, A. Catapano, F. Coccia) while they still were on the NEOCP list. More details about the telescope, the magnitude, number of images & exposition, asteroid speed & PA etc. are on the images. Click on each image for a bigger version. All the processing has been made with TYCHO software by D. Parrott.

2020 VX5 (neocp designation C3WZUQ2) is an Apollo-type asteroid discovered by G96 Mt. Lemmon Survey on November 15, 2020. This asteroid has an estimated size of 55 m - 120 m (H=23.4) and it had a close approach with Earth at about 29 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.074 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers) at 1950 UT on 11 Nov. 2020.
2020 VX5
© Remanzacco Blogspot

Fireball 5

Tunguska explosion in 1908 caused by asteroid grazing Earth says new theory

A new theory explains the mysterious explosion in Siberia, scientists say, suggesting Earth barely escaped a far greater catastrophe.
Asteroid
© Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock
In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a massive explosion flattened entire forests in a remote region of Eastern Siberia along the Tunguska River. Curiously, the explosion left no crater, creating a mystery that has puzzled scientists ever since — what could have caused such a huge blast without leaving any remnants of itself?

Now Daniil Khrennikov at the Siberian Federal University in Russia and colleagues have published a new model of the incident that may finally resolve the mystery. Khrennikov and co say the explosion was caused by an asteroid that grazed the Earth, entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle and then passing out again into space.

"We argue that the Tunguska event was caused by an iron asteroid body, which passed through the Earth's atmosphere and continued to the near-solar orbit," they say. If they are correct, the theory suggests Earth escaped an even larger disaster by a hair's breadth.

First some background. Scientists have long speculated on the cause of the Tunguska impact. Perhaps the most widely discussed idea is that the explosion was the result of an icy body, such as a comet, entering the atmosphere. The ice then rapidly heated up and evaporated explosively in mid-air but without ever hitting the ground.

Fireball 4

Meteor fireball lights up Mexican skies and rains fire on northern states

Meteor Fireball
© AMS Meteors Org
Residents across northeastern Mexico were stunned when a green-hued fireball lit up the night sky on Tuesday. Authorities reported that the fiery debris caused localised bushfires in the vicinity.

Reports came flooding in from across the northern state of Nuevo Leon after the suspected meteorite streaked across the sky at approximately 22:14 local time on Tuesday night.

Eyewitness and doorbell cam videos captured the intensity of the fiery phenomenon as it burned bright through the darkness.


Meteor

Why are so many asteroids having close calls with Earth in 2020?

asteroids
Have you noticed that it seems like stories about asteroids that are approaching the Earth are constantly in the news this year? It wasn't always this way. In the old days, maybe there would be a story about an asteroid every once in a while, and those stories were never a big deal. But now asteroids are zipping by our planet with frightening regularity, and several more very notable passes will happen over the next few weeks. For example, an asteroid that was just discovered on September 18th will come very, very close to the Earth on Thursday. According to NASA, it will actually come closer to our planet than many of our weather satellites...
An asteroid about the size of an RV or small school bus will zoom past the Earth on Thursday, NASA announced, passing within 13,000 miles of the Earth's surface.

That's much closer than the moon and is actually closer than some of our weather satellites.
This asteroid will speed by at more than 17,000 mph, but the good news is that it is so small that it would not be a serious threat even if it hit us.

But two other very large asteroids are also going to pass the Earth by the end of this month, and both of them are large enough to do an enormous amount of damage...

Comment: No, dear author, it is not just our imagination that the close calls with asteroids and other near-earth objects are increasing in frequency.

And here is why we think they are - from Sott.net in 2007:
War, rumors of war, corrupt governments run by psychopaths, phony terrorism, burgeoning police states...but is that all we have to worry about? What if there was something to put it all in context? Or rather, what if there is something else we are missing, something that is beyond the control of even the political and corporate elite; something that is driving them to attempt to herd the global population to an ever finer order of control...

A new sott.net video production:




Info

The Younger Dryas impact research debate update

Ice Age Skeletons
© Jonathan Chen / CC BY-SA 4.0Ice Age Diorama. From left to right: Equus hemionus, Mammuthus primigenius, Coelodonta antiquitatis, Bison exiguous skeletal mounts at the Tianjin Natural History Museum.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has received considerable attention since its publication in 2007 in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). It suggests the Younger Dryas geological period and mini Ice-Age, from around 10,850 to 9600 BC, along with associated megafaunal extinctions and human societal changes, was triggered by a catastrophic cosmic impact, probably with a fragmented comet from the Taurid meteor stream.

As of now, this paper by Richard Firestone, Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith and colleagues has amassed over 550 citations in Google Scholar - which is a lot! It is on its way to becoming a classic. But it has also received more than its fair share of criticism, mostly sustained from just a handful of vehement opponents. But has any of their criticism stuck? And what is the status of Firestone et al.'s paper today? Has the dust settled on an outcome? Are we there yet?
Evolution of Temperatures
© Evolution of temperature in the Post-Glacial period according to Greenland ice cores/CC BY-SA 4.0Evolution of temperatures in the post glacial period, after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), showing very low temperatures for the most part of the Younger Dryas, rapidly rising afterwards to reach the level of the warm Holocene, based on Greenland ice cores.

Info

100 million-year-old meteorite crater discovered Down Under

Ora Banda Impact Crater
© Resource PotentialsA color-coded gravity image of the Ora Banda Impact Crater site. The crater (deep blue) is in the middle of the image.
Gold miners in the Australian Outback recently discovered a gigantic meteorite crater dating to about 100 million years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Found near the Western Australian town of Ora Banda, the newly dubbed Ora Banda Impact Crater is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across. This huge hole was likely created by a meteorite up to 660 feet (200 meters) wide, or longer than the length of two American football fields, according to Resourc.ly, a Western Australia news outlet.

When geologists at Evolution Mining, an Australian gold mining company, came across some unusual rock cores at Ora Banda, they called Jayson Meyers, the principal geophysicist, director and founder of Resource Potentials, a geophysics consulting and contracting company in Perth. Meyers examined the geologists' drill core samples, as well as rock samples from the site, and he immediately noticed the shatter cones — telltale signs of a meteorite crash.

Shatter cones form when high-pressure, high-velocity shock waves from a large impacting object — such as a meteorite or a gigantic explosion (such as would occur at a nuclear testing site) — rattle an area, according to the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), a nonprofit group based in Tucson, Arizona, which was not involved with the new find. These shock waves shatter rock into the unique shatter cone shape, just like a mark that a hard object can leave on a car's windshield.

Because "we know they didn't do any nuclear testing at Ora Banda," the evidence suggests that an ancient impact crater hit the site, Meyers told Resourc.ly.