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Comet

Hoax? Lightning strikes 'UFO' above Austria as crowd gathers to watch New Year's fireworks (VIDEO)

Lightning strike meteor
© Marie Mela
An Austrian student's video of a UFO-like object captured while lighting New Year's fireworks has gone viral after it was posted online.

Marie Mela from Vienna was enjoying the New Year with friends in the Mostviertel region of Lower Austria, famous for the large number of pear orchards from where schnapps and cider are made.

But she insists that the video on her Facebook post is genuine, and has appealed in her message for anybody else who saw the phenomena to get in touch.

The video shows a group of young people outside with the clinking of champagne glasses, and the sound of the Danube waltz traditionally clearly heard playing as it is a New Year tradition in Austria as people wish each other all the best for 2016.


Comment: Hmmm, lightning in Austria in the dead of winter? Not likely, say local meteorologists:
However, weather experts have cast doubt on the video's authenticity, telling the Kurier newspaper that there was no lightning in the Mostviertel area on New Year's Eve. "We have also seen the video, and we checked the weather conditions at the time. There was no lightning in the area," Ubimet meteorologist Roland Reiter said.
We've seen lightning strikes light up and possibly even hit UFOs before, but this would be the first time we've seen lightning strike one of these spiraling comet-like UFOs, which have been sighted a number of times all over the world in recent years:

Reading Celestial Intentions Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: Missiles, UFOs and the Cold War

Many of these cone-shaped 'UFOs', which usually begin as bright objects crossing the sky at apparently very high altitudes, and whose tails then fan out before the main object appears to 'separate' and create a spiral formation, behave so much like rockets launched into space that we've found it all but impossible to discern them from 'UFOS' (which, we suspect, are actually comet fragments entering, not leaving, the upper atmosphere).

The very high altitudes involved conflict with the scenario presented in the above video: lightning like this, at the level of clouds, should occur far lower than any comet-like tail.

For what it's worth, the original uploader, Marie Mela, insists the video is genuine, despite frame-by-frame analysis appearing to reveal flaws in the footage.


Fireball 2

Meteor fireball captured on dash cam over Colorado (VIDEO)

Meteor Over Colorado
© Scripps Media, Inc.
Denver -- It's a sight not many people are fortunate enough to see, but one that a Colorado resident was fortunate enough to capture. Denver7 started getting calls about a meteor falling from the sky at around 6:50 p.m.

One viewer who did not wish to be identified told Denver7 he was at Holly and 120th Avenue when he spotted the falling rock going down in what he said appeared to be an area near Sports Authority Field. He said it happened at around 6:45 p.m.

At around 8:30 p.m., a Denver viewer from Littleton emailed the newsroom and said he caught the meteor on his dash cam on his way home Thursday evening. "It was traveling to the south," the viewer told Denver7.

He said he was driving near the area of Bowles and Wadsworth in Littleton when the sighting took place.


Fireball 4

Bright meteor fireball illuminates sky over Buryatia, Russia (VIDEO)

Buryatia meteor fireball
© Youtube/Lev Abashkin (screen capture)
According to baikal-daily.ru there have been numerous reports of a bright meteor fireball exploding over the Buryatia region of Russia on 25th October. Some reports on social media sites (translated by google) include:
"For the Barguzin ridge, close to Lake Baikal, just fallen meteorite !!! It was as bright as day five or six seconds! Sensation!"

"Around 19:00 .. it fell from the sky shone brightly Kameta green (for the size is quite large)"

"Somewhere at 19:30 in the sky flew whether comet whether a meteor. There was a powerful flash. Who else saw? Kurumkan!"

"Have you seen this ??? I went at 19:40 on a grandmother and suddenly glow in the sky at the likeness of a meteorite or green satellite"

"Today, about 19: 50, was a strange flash in the sky. Flew what looked like a comet with a green tail."

"Has anyone seen about 19:40 dropped something like a meteorite seen in gurulbe fell apart Sotnikovo bright green color is very beautiful, no sound, nothing."
The Republic of Buryatia is located in the south-central region of Siberia along the eastern shore of Lake Baikal.


Meteor

Bright meteor fireball recorded over Espirito Santo, Brazil (VIDEO)

Bright Meteor Fireball recorded over Espirito Santo Brazil Thursday 20th October 2016
The meteor fireball was recorded by a monitoring station
A bright meteor fireball was recorded on Thursday 20th October 2016 by a monitoring station over northern Espirito Santo, Brazil, at 03:56AM.

Fireball 2

'Meteor-like objects' fall in Peerumade, India

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
Meteor-like objects that fell in Peerumade on Tuesday night created moments of tension.

District Collector G.R. Gokul told The Hindu that the image he received was similar to meteoroids and the Peerumade police were directed to cordon off the area.

However, the image was not of a rock, he said adding that people were advised against coming in contact with the objects.

A team of officials led by a senior scientist from the Geological Survey of India would examine the objects on Wednesday, he said. Meteoroid is a rocky or metallic body in the outer space. When coming into contact with the atmospheric pressure, it burns. A police officer said that they had alerted the people about the fallen objects and they would not be allowed to go near the objects.

Fireball 5

Wisconsin university rooftop camera picks up meteor fireball flying over Madison

UW meteor over Madison
© UW Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
The UW Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences caught a meteor streaking through the sky south of Madison around 9:20 p.m. on Monday on their rooftop camera.


Comment: Another fireball was reported the same day at 6:00am across the Great Lakes in Ottawa, Canada.

Meteor fireball seen shooting over Ottawa, Canada


Fireball 5

Meteor fireball seen shooting over Ottawa, Canada

Ottawa meteor
© Eugene Deery/CBCThis still, taken from a dashcam video submitted by Eugene Deery, shows what could be a meteor streaking across the sky early Monday morning.
A bright streak of light crossing the sky over Ottawa-Gatineau early Monday morning has been reported by several residents.

Mary Dallimore was driving north along the Airport Parkway just before 6 a.m. after dropping her husband off at the airport when she saw it.

"There were no cars in front of me, no cars coming at me, no cars behind me and I had a clear view of the sky. It wasn't there and then it was there. It happened so fast. I saw this bright, bright, bright light go in an arc over the city, and then it just disappeared as fast as it came," Dallimore said by phone later Monday morning.

"I've never seen anything like it. It was brilliant and I hope to see something like that again."



Info

New study: Extraterrestrial impact preceded ancient global warming event

Microtektites
© Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteMicrotektites as first seen in a sediment sample from the onset of the Paeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
A comet strike may have triggered the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a rapid warming of the Earth caused by an accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide 56 million years ago, which offers analogs to global warming today. Sorting through samples of sediment from the time period, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered evidence of the strike in the form of microtektites - tiny dark glassy spheres typically formed by extraterrestrial impacts. The research will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

"This tells us that there was an extraterrestrial impact at the time this sediment was deposited - a space rock hit the planet," said Morgan Schaller, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Rensselaer, and corresponding author of the paper.

"The coincidence of an impact with a major climate change is nothing short of remarkable." Schaller is joined in the research by Rensselaer professor Miriam Katz and graduate student Megan Fung, James Wright of Rutgers University, and Dennis Kent of Columbia University.

Schaller was searching for fossilized remains of Foraminifera, a tiny organism that produces a shell, when he first noticed a microtektite in the sediment he was examining. Although it is common for researchers to search for fossilized remains in PETM sediments, microtektites have not been previously detected. Schaller and his team theorize this is because microtektites are typically dark in color, and do not stand out on the black sorting tray researchers use to search for light-colored fossilized remains. Once Schaller noticed the first microtektite, the researchers switched to a white sorting tray, and began to find more.

At peak abundance, the research team found as many as three microtektites per gram of sediment examined. Microtektites are typically spherical, or tear-drop shaped, and are formed by an impact powerful enough to melt and vaporize the target area, casting molten ejecta into the atmosphere. Some microtektites from the samples contained "shocked quartz," definitive evidence of their impact origin, and exhibited microcraters or were sintered together, evidence of the speed at which they were traveling as they solidified and hit the ground.

Fireball 3

Increasing number of meteorite impacts recorded on the Moon

Lunar Crater
© NASA/GSFC/Arizona State UniversityA new lunar crater, formed about three years ago.
Meteorites have punched at least 222 impact craters into the Moon's surface in the past 7 years. That's 33% more than researchers expected, and suggests that future lunar astronauts may need to hunker down against incoming space rocks.

"It's just something that's happening all the time," says Emerson Speyerer, an engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe and author of a 12 October paper in Nature1.

Planetary geologists will also need to rethink their understanding of the age of the lunar surface, which depends on counting craters and estimating how long the terrain has been pummelled by impacts.

Although most of the craters dotting the Moon's surface formed millions of years ago, space rocks and debris continue to create fresh pockmarks. In 2011, a team led by Ingrid Daubar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, compared some of the first pictures taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which launched in 2009, with decades-old images taken by the Apollo astronauts.

The scientists spotted five fresh impact craters in the LRO images. Then, on two separate occasions in 2013, other astronomers using telescopes on Earth spotted bright flashes on the Moon; LRO later flew over those locations and photographed the freshly formed craters2, 3.

Fireball 4

Bright green meteor fireball observed streaking across South Central US

meteor over southern US
© Amy Retcher Dyess
WGNO News is investigating the possibility of a meteor streaking across the sky in Metairie.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department got a call of a possible plane crash on the Lake Pontchartrain Levee near Severn Avenue shortly before 7 a.m.

Our news crew responded and talked to a woman who says she saw a green light streaking across the sky and thought that it could have been a plane that was crashing.

Numerous agencies responded to the call, including the Jefferson Parish Fire Department, The Sheriff's Department, Lake Pontchartrain Levee Police and The Louisiana State Police.

Now it appears that it could have been a meteor.


Comment: The American Meteor Society (AMS) received over 600 reports about a fireball seen over MS, GA, TN, LA, FL, AL, KY and TX on Wednesday, October 12th 2016 around 11:48 UT.

According to Mike Hankey of the AMS "This was rarer than most as it was seen early in the morning. Also several reports of big smoke cloud left behind."

The object was was first seen 65 miles above Sawyersville, Alabama and moved west at about 89,000 mile per hour. NASA said "It appears to have fragmented 41 miles above Louisville, Mississippi."

south central US meteor map
© Google/AMS (screen capture)