Fireballs
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Fireball 4

Bright green meteor fireball streaks over northern Germany

Very bright meteor fireball over Germany on April 16, 2019.
© AMSVery bright meteor fireball over Germany on April 16, 2019.
A bright green fireball was seen and recorded streaking through the night sky above northern Germany on April 16, 2019 around 21:51 UT.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received more than 60 reports of event 1774-2019 from Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

A video was uploaded to AMS showing the event together with 1775-2019, which shows another bright meteor fireball blaze over the US east coast. AMS has received 417 reports of this event on Wednesday, April 17th 2019 around 02:57 UT.


Fireball

Dazzling meteor fireball spotted soaring over Washington DC area

A meteor was seen along the U.S. East Coast on late Tuesday night
© Steve ChazinA meteor was seen along the U.S. East Coast on late Tuesday night
Hundreds of people in the Mid-Atlantic and New England reported they looked up on Tuesday night and saw a meteor hurtling through the skies.

The meteor soared over the D.C. area about 11 p.m., and the brilliant shine caught a lot of eyes.

Steve Chazin was driving from Virginia's Dulles Airport on Route 50 when his dashcam caught the sight: an illuminated orb flying through the skies, surrounded by a glow and backed by a tail.

The American Meteor Society had 325 reports of the celestial event pour in from Washington, D.C., and 11 states, including Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.


Comment: Additional footage of the event:








Fireball

A meteor fireball flies over the Mediterranean, falling off the Moroccan coast

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
On Sunday, a fireball was recorded by a Spanish platform that detects meteoroids. The rock was produced by a rock detached from an asteroid, a Spanish astrophysicist told Yabiladi.

On Sunday, April the 14th, a fireball was spotted near the Moroccan coast. The phenomenon was recorded in the framework of the SMART project (University of Huelva), created to detect meteoroids interacting with the Earth's atmosphere, Meteor News reported.

It was produced by a meteoroid from the Virginids that hit the atmosphere at about 65,000 km/h, the scientific platform added.

Speaking to Yabiladi on Tuesday, Spanish astrophysicist José María Madiedo who is part of the SMART project said that the fireball that flew over the Mediterranean «was produced by a rock detached from an asteroid.



Fireball 2

SpaceX contracted by NASA to attempt to 'redirect' asteroid

Asteroids
© Pixabay

Despite an admission last year that it may be impossible to stop the 8.8 ton asteroid
Bennu from annihilating life on Earth, the perennial optimists at NASA have nevertheless granted SpaceX a $69 million contract to assist in the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), intended to save Earth from interstellar armageddon. The test, tentatively scheduled for June 2021, will have Elon's Musketeers crashing a kinetic impactor - in this case, a spacecraft equipped with cameras and solar panels - into a small moonlet accompanying Didymos, an 800-meter-long near-Earth asteroid. NASA notes that the moonlet, dubbed "Didymoon" by scientists, "is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose a more common hazard to Earth" than its massive chaperone.

The goal, NASA says, is to launch the DART spacecraft atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will then make its way to Didymos and Didymoon to attempt to alter the latter's trajectory in a rehearsal for what could one day be a high-stakes game of cosmic bumper cars. "By using solar electric propulsion," NASA says, "DART will intercept the asteroid Didymos' small moon in October 2022, when the asteroid will be within 11 million kilometers of Earth." Meanwhile, Earthlings will watch with bated breath.

"The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent," NASA promises, "enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth."

Fireball 5

Meteor fireball lights up the sky in the upper Midwest

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
People in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Western Wisconsin witnessed something rare Sunday night, April 14, when a bright meteor lit up the night sky.

Jason Doty of south Fargo caught this video the fireball on his doorbell camera at 11:20 p.m.

A fireball is a larger than average meteor, a rock in space that hits the atmosphere at high speed causing it to burn up.

Thousands of fireballs occur every day around the globe, but most are not seen because they are usually over the ocean.

(See video here)

Comment: Two nights later another: Meteor fireball streaks through Minnesota's night sky


Fireball

Meteor fireball streaks through Minnesota's night sky

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
There were witness reports from Grand Forks all the way to the Twin Cities.

A vibrant meteor lit up the sky from North Dakota to Wisconsin overnight, and Michael Stanga captured it on video around 2:30 a.m. as he looked to the northwest from Otsego, Minnesota.


Comment: Two nights earlier in the same region: Meteor fireball lights up the sky in the upper Midwest


Fireball 2

Very bright meteor fireball illuminates night sky over Brazil

Brazil meteor
© YouTube/AMS/L. KLITZKE (screen capture)
A very bright meteor fireball illuminated the night sky over Rio Grande do Sul and State of Santa Catarina, Brazil on April 12, 2019 according to the American Meteor Society (AMS).

The impressive event (1702-2019) was recorded and a video uploaded to the AMS website.


Fireball 5

Meteor fireball recorded over San Antonio, Texas

Texas meteor
© AMS/J. BoydMeteor fireball over Texas (Event #2019-1671)
A bright meteor fireball was recorded blazing through the night sky over San Antonio, Texas on April 11, 2019.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 45 reports of the event.


Info

'Morphospace' governs recovery after mass extinction

Mass Extinction Event
© MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty ImagesThe re-establishment of species diversity following an extinction event is consistently slower than evolutionary theory predicts.
Theory tells us that after a mass extinction, an event where the diversity of species is drastically reduced, nature should rebound with a flurry of creativity. Species should quickly proliferate to refill desolate ecosystems, something called adaptive radiation.

Yet, the paleontological record suggests that this doesn't happen at anywhere near the expected pace. Now, research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution argues that understanding something called "morphospace" might help us find the cause.

Extinction events happen with alarming regularity: there's the "big five", but a host of slightly smaller, yet still devastating extinctions have peppered the planet's history.

Scientists now worry that we might be in the middle of one of our own making, so this makes it all the more important to understand how the natural world bounces back from such catastrophes.

Perhaps the most well-known of the earth's mass extinctions is the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. This took place 66 million years ago when an asteroid smacked into the earth next to what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, creating the nearly 200-kilometre-wide depression known as the Chicxulub crater. This impact drove the extinction of all the non-avian dinosaurs, and much else besides.

Meteor

Meteor fireball cause of sonic boom heard in northeast Oklahoma

The GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) capture a meteor in NE Oklahoma around 5:20pm. The meteor was visible across much of the area and a large green fireball.

The meteor created a smoke trail as it burned across the sky; Tisha Rowley shot this picture of the smoke.
Meteor smoke trail over NE OK
The meteor generated a sonic boom as it burned entering Earth's atmosphere; the boom was heard across much of our area.

If you heard a low rumble or something that sounded like "thunder" in the distance between 5:20-5:25pm: you heard the meteor.

Comment: A daytime meteor was also seen earlier that day over Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia