WGNS has received multiple phone calls and emails from residents in the area of Smyrna telling us that they heard a loud "BOOM" sound Monday night. The sound was heard around 8:30 in the evening.
WGNS checked with the Smyrna Police Department where we talked to Police Chief Kevin Arnold. Arnold told us, "We received several complaints last night about that. The Sheriff's Office also received complaints. From the log this morning it appears nothing was found."
We then headed to the Smyrna / Rutherford County Airport. There, we were told that no "BOOM" sounds involving airplanes were reported on Monday night. Several workers there told us they did not hear the "BOOM."
So that leaves us with the big question... What was that big "BOOM" sound that was heard Monday? It seems as if we cannot find the answer to that mystery.
Fireballs
A strange comet-like object discovered in 2010 ended up being an asteroid that had been the victim of a head-on collision from another space rock. The object created a bit of buzz because of its mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and long, trailing streamers of dust. Named P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), the object is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has been the focus of much study, including images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and many ground-based observatories. But over time, the asteroid's long dust tail has grown to be so long that the entire object can't fit into the field of view of most observatories.
"Here, we are watching the death of an asteroid," said Jayadev Rajagopal, a scientist at the WIYN (Wisconsin Indiana at Yale NOAO) Telescope, speaking today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. "We know of dozens of asteroids this has happened to in the past, but this is the only one showing us the event as it is happening."
Using the new wide-field camera at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, Rajagopal and his team have found that the peculiar asteroid P/2010 A2′s tail is much longer than was previously supposed. The tail is about a million kilometers long, roughly three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The new One Degree Imager (ODI) can currently image an area of the sky about the size of the full moon: a future upgrade will increase the size of the field to about four times as large.
© NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)
Hubble Views of Comet-like Asteroid P/2010 A2.
Hubble Views of Comet-like Asteroid P/2010 A2.
Using the new wide-field camera at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, Rajagopal and his team have found that the peculiar asteroid P/2010 A2′s tail is much longer than was previously supposed. The tail is about a million kilometers long, roughly three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The new One Degree Imager (ODI) can currently image an area of the sky about the size of the full moon: a future upgrade will increase the size of the field to about four times as large.
Florence - If you saw what is described as a "fireball" around 11:05 p.m. last night, you were not alone.
The Recorder received a report about a meteor flying over Florence last night. According to the American Meteor Society, more than 50 witnesses reported a large fireball meteor over Ohio May 30.
The fireball was seen primarily from Ohio and Indiana, but witnesses from Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina also made reports.
The society has developed technology that can plot the path of any fireball reported to their system. According to amsmeteors.org, the accuracy of these paths is dependent on the number of witnesses who report the event and their distribution around the fireball.
This particular event provided a large volume and good geographic distribution of witnesses.
The society urges witnesses of the fireball to fill out an official report with them. Visit their website to do so.
The Recorder received a report about a meteor flying over Florence last night. According to the American Meteor Society, more than 50 witnesses reported a large fireball meteor over Ohio May 30.
The fireball was seen primarily from Ohio and Indiana, but witnesses from Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina also made reports.
The society has developed technology that can plot the path of any fireball reported to their system. According to amsmeteors.org, the accuracy of these paths is dependent on the number of witnesses who report the event and their distribution around the fireball.
This particular event provided a large volume and good geographic distribution of witnesses.
The society urges witnesses of the fireball to fill out an official report with them. Visit their website to do so.
© Aki Taavitsainen
The fireball was captured by a photographer in Mikkeli, eastern Finland.
The fireball was captured by a photographer in Mikkeli, eastern Finland.
The Ursa Astronomical Association confirmed that a bright light and loud boom seen and heard by almost 300 Finnish citizens on May 8th was a meteor. The space rock was estimated to be about half a metre long and weighing 50 kilos.
© Getty, YDB Research Group
There's new evidence of a comet impact 13,000 years ago.
There's new evidence of a comet impact 13,000 years ago.
Roughly 13,000 years ago, something touched off the 'Big Freeze' - a 1,300-year-long cold snap formally called the Younger Dryas stadial - that caused major climate changes and droughts.
These have been blamed for the extinction of the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and also the downfall of the ancient Clovis culture. However, what that something was has been debated for years.
One idea that's proven popular over the years is that a meteorite or comet struck the planet, somewhere around what is now Hudson Bay. However, if something big enough to melt the Laurentide ice sheet had hit the planet there should have been some indication of it, in the form of a crater, or shocked and melted rocks, or 'impact spherules'. And, until recently, the evidence was lacking.
© Kuva Ursa / Mikko Suominen / Celestia
Estimated trajectory of today's overhead explosion in Finland
Estimated trajectory of today's overhead explosion in Finland
The flight route of the bright fireball that flew over Southern Finland on Wednesday 8th of May has been modelled. Esko Lyytinen, mathematician of URSA astronomical association and member of URSA Finnish Fireball Working Group, estimated that about 5kg of the fireball ended up on the earth's surface, in the southern part of Huittinen. There were over 300 sightings of the fireball reported in the URSA database.
The exact flight route estimation was based on the meteor camera pictures of URSA Finnish Fireball Working Group. Photographers of the fireball route were Johan Linden in Turku and Aki Taavitsainen in Mikkeli.
The cause of the fireball light phenomena was a meteoroid that passed through the atmosphere. Based on the simulation, the mass of the meteoroid was about 50 kilograms, and it's diameter was about 30 centimeters. It arrived in the atmosphere at a 43 degree angle.
The speed of the object was about 23 kilometers per second when it arrived the atmosphere. It ignited into a glowing fireball near Mynämäki at the height of 60 kilometers, from where it travelled into north-east. After crossing Lake Pyhäjärvi, the fireball flamed out northeast of Säkylä, at an altitude of about 23 kilometers.
© Wikimedia Commons
This particularly bright Leonid meteor was captured in November of 2009.
This particularly bright Leonid meteor was captured in November of 2009.
Glimpses of the bolide were reported from Maryland in the U.S., to Ajax, Ontario as it burned up in the atmosphere. People reporting the event on American Meteor Society website called it one of the "brightest fireballs [they'd] ever seen" with a wide, bright flame trail.
'Fireball' is the name given to a meteor that appears to be brighter than Venus - one of the brightest planets in our sky, and a 'bolide' is a fireball that burns so bright that it can outshine the full moon. While spotting a fireball is rare, the meteors that cause them aren't; according to the AMS, several thousand occur in Earth's atmosphere each day.
In the following excerpt from radio-canada.ca TV news, a man describes his car windshield being smacked by a small dark meteorite on May 21, 2013.
Source [From 10'30"]
Source [From 10'30"]
© LunarMeteoriteHunter / Google Earth
18 May 2013 - Tristen Dixon Vilonia, AR 22:45:00
5 seconds duration. I faced east, it went from south to north. Green/white color and very bright.18 May 2013 - J.B., Augusta, Arkansas, USA 22:40:00
Approx 4 seconds duration. S-N direction. Bright blue and green with white flashes. Bright as the moon, flashes as bright as the sun, like lightning. Small pieces like sparks. Could swear I heard a distant jet-like noise which may have been an actual jet but it did directly coincide with the meteor, so... ????18 May 2013 - Michael Schoelzel, Mascoutah, IL, 22:40 cst
I saw the last 2 seconds. It started east and traveled west. I was looking south. Super brilliant white & green. Super bright! Fragmentation, looked like it disintegrated with green fragments as it was breaking apart. Probably second most amazing thing I've seen, right after last week's observation, interestingly in the same area of the sky from my point of view. Simply breathtaking! Something is really not right here, I've been fascinated with the sky all my life, but only in recent years, or better yet months, have I ever witnessed such wild activity, thank you for the interest, I feel better now having reported it!
Comment: Ah, the normalcy bias: "Earth has always been impacted by hundreds of tonnes of small objects from space, so the spectacular fireballs phenomenon everyone the world over has noticed in the past few years has always been so, except that now, people suddenly notice them more..."
Does that sound credible to you?
Note the casual remark at the very end, after giving us 'the dry facts' about fireballs: Say what?!
That is rare! Well, it was rare. It's more normal now! But only because something wicked this way comes...