Fireballs
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Fireball 4

'Unique' meteorite likely came from long-dead asteroid

Meteorite_1
© Discovery News
A well-known meteorite that was the first to be tracked by ground-based cameras as it blasted through the Earths atmosphere and quickly recovered at its Australian fall site has been identified as a geological oddity.

The Bunburra Rockhole meteorite was recovered from the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia in 2007 and, after recent isotopic tests, its basaltic composition started a cosmic forensics investigation that has led researchers to believe it originated from an asteroid that no longer exists.

"This (meteorite) has a particular composition - which makes us think that it comes from a different body that has not been sampled before," said geochronologist and geochemist Fred Jourdan, associate professor at Curtin University, Perth. Jourdan and his team's work has been accepted for publication in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Fireball 2

Kola fireball meteorites found in Russia

Kola Fireball
© Asko Aikkila/Finnish Fireball NetworkAmateur astronomer and physics teacher Asko Aikkila caught this image of the Kola fireball on videotape in Kuusamo, Finland on April 19, 2014. The picture has been processed to enhance the details.
A spectacular fireball that crackled across the sky near the Russia-Finnish border on April 19th this year left more than a bright flash. A team of meteor researchers from Finland, Russia and the Czech Republic scoured the predicted impact zone and recently discovered extraterrestrial booty.

Fireball 4

Explosive Bolide over Brasília, Brazil

Posted to YouTube by Carlos Bella


Fireball 5

New kind of meteorite found

Meteor Shower
© argus/ShutterstockIllustration of a meteor shower.
For 50 years, scientists have wondered what annihilated the ancestor of L-chondrites, the roof-smashing, head-bonking meteorites that frequently pummel Earth.

Now, a new kind of meteorite discovered in a southern Sweden limestone quarry may finally solve the mystery, scientists report. The strange new rock may be the missing "other half" from one of the biggest interstellar collisions in a billion years.

"Something we didn't really know about before was flying around and crashed into the L-chondrites," said study co-author Gary Huss of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The space rock is a 470-million-year-old fossil meteorite first spotted three years ago by workers at Sweden's Thorsberg quarry, where stonecutters have an expert eye for extraterrestrial objects. Quarriers have plucked 101 fossil meteorites from the pit's ancient pink limestone in the last two decades. [Photos: New Kind of Meteorite Found in Sweden]

Researchers have nicknamed the new meteorite the "mysterious object" until its formal name is approved, said lead study author Birger Schmitz, of Lund University in Sweden and Chicago's Field Museum. It will likely be named for a nearby church, the Österplana, he said.

Fireball 3

June 6 Ontario, Canada Fireball 'bright as Moon'


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Initial Meteor Sighting Report


06JUN2014 Edsel Burlington, Ontario, Canada 22:05:00 3-4 secs n light yellow bright as moon yes it had one large piece and 1 small piece trailing behind

06JUN2014 Donald Johnston Georgetown, Ontario, Canada 10:30? 2-4 secs slightly south west to slightly north east blue / white / amber brighter then moon yes broke apart and stopped emitting light before horizon.

06JUN2014 Doug Stoney Creek, Canada 2205 1 sec max S-N I was facing north Super Bright lime Green popsicle colour faint sound like a bunson burner like a roman candle firework super bright not that I could see went down into lake ontario about 10miles north of me about 1/3 of the way accross the lake to Toronto. Was about 10 times the size of an airplane at that distance

MBIQ Data Set- Toronto, Ontario arrived from google.ca on "Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News: The Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News 06JUN2014" by searching for june 6 2014 meteorite.
11:30:38 -- 10 minutes ago

All 8 meteor sighting reports can be seen here

Fireball

June 5 "Huge' Fireball seen in at least 5 states - likely meteorites fell in Wyoming

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Initial Report


05JUN/2014 Matt Bellvue, CO 9:21pm MST 8-10? S to N, Facing East, R to L white, red hue at peak Brighter than Venus. large trail but no frags observed very flat trajectory. Tried for photo, too quick.

05JUN/2014 Ben Weeks Livermore Colorado USA 21:22 - 9:22 pm MT 3 seconds? east to west I was loking north Huge Fireball falling star, largest I have ever seen by far, maybe ten percent of the size of the full moon relative to my perspective. I am in lnorth east Colorado 30 miles from Wyoming it was north of me traveling east to west Very very bright the size and the distint fireball surrounding were nothing like I have ever seen and I am 50+. I could see the large object (bolide?) and the gren fire swirling around it!The object was actually darker the fireball bright as the moon. I have never seen the swirls of the fireball before or anything this big. No fragmentation Incredible. I will never forget it.

05JUNE2014 Chris Perry Loveland 2224 MT Pm 5-7 seconds right/left northwest right to left northeast pink/blue no sound moon none observed none

05JUN2014 Dane Andersen Sioux Falls, SD, USA 10:00PM (UTC-06:00 15 sec SE-NW facing West Orange sparkling tail, no sound About the same as the moon. Yes, there was a tail. This is my first supposed meteor sighting, so I hope I'm not way off. I was awestruck, so I had to go somewhere to learn more. I haven't seen anything quite like it before, with its particular size, speed, distance, and appearance. Educate me if I'm full of shit!

Blue Planet

Best of the Web: Signs of change: Video round-up of extreme weather and seismic activity in May 2014

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Record flooding in the Balkans last month
Large scale disasters continue to strike with regularity, causing catastrophic damage to multiple areas around the globe, and leaving hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Rare, strange, unusually extreme and 'biblical' weather conditions have taken place the past week or so. Also included are some dramatically breathtaking weather events caught on video last month.

Thanks for watching and stay safe! Have a plan in order!


Fireball 5

Fireballs light up the radio sky, hinting at unexplored physics

Plasma Trail
© Gregory Taylor (University of New Mexico)A series of All-Sky (fish eye) images showing the plasma trail left by a fireball, which extends 92 degrees across the northern half of the sky. These images are 5 second snapshots captured at 37.8 MHz with the LWA1 radio telescope. The bright steady sources (Cygnus A, Cassiopeia A, the galactic plane, etc) have been removed using image subtraction. See Animated Image Here
At any given moment, it seems, the sky is sizzling with celestial phenomena waiting to be stumbled upon. New research using the Long Wavelength Array (LWA, a collection of radio dishes in New Mexico, found quite the surprise. Fireballs - those brilliant meteors that leave behind glowing streaks in the night sky - unexpectedly emit a low radio frequency, hinting at new unexplored physics within these meteor streaks.

The LWA keeps its eyes to the sky day and night, probing a poorly explored region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's one of only a handful of blind searches carried out below 100 MHz.

Over the course of 11,000 hours, graduate student Kenneth Obenberger from the University of New Mexico and colleagues found 49 radio bursts, 10 of which came from fireballs.

Most of the bursts appear as large point sources, limited to four degrees, roughly eight times the size of the full Moon. Some, however, extend several degrees across the sky. On January 21, 2014, a source left a trail covering 92 degrees in less than 10 seconds (see above). The end point continued to glow for another 90 seconds.

Fireball 5

Fireball spotted in the sky over Central Victoria, Australia

Fireball
© Solua Middleton/ABCDr Andy Tomkins says meteorites can been seen hundreds of kilometres away from ground level.
Dr Andy Tomkins is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Geoscienes at Monash University.

He says there were reported sightings of a loud, white flash at ground level at around 6:30pm on the worldwide meteorites news website.

"It would have been a meteorite coming in somewhere from Mars and Jupiter, they usually come from that sort of orbit, and just coming through our atmosphere really, really fast and burning up as it came through the atmosphere and hopefully landing on the ground."

Dr Tomkins encourages people to check their CTTV cameras from Sunday evening in hope of locating the meteorite.

"We can use that to figure out the direction that the meteorite came from and where it's likely to have ended up on the ground, particularly if there is some sort of time stamp on the video that really helps us nail it down as well."

"We use video from multiple directions from where people have seen it from multiple angles to triangulate down toward the ground position."

He says people who heard a loud bang on Sunday evening would have been within close proximity to its landing.

"Usually it gets brighter the closer you are to it, then a bang, the boom people heard is when you're really close to it, people can usually see a smoke trail if they're fairly close."

Fireball 5

Was it a bird or a plane? No, a meteorite strikes Ohio man's car

Meteorite Strikes Car
© Dee Moorman Massa describes the damage to his car after an impact around 2 a.m. Sunday.
Dayton - A Kettering man believes a meteorite hit his car early Sunday morning. Joe Massa said he was driving home in the center lane on I-75 North when his Buick was struck by something around 2 a.m.

Out of the corner of his eye, he said, "I could see something. It was a light, shadow, a beam of light, small. Within a split second, something hit me, the front of the car was pushed over into the far left lane."

Massa said there was a big flash when it hit.

"It was like a silent pop," Massa said, "then there was pressure in the car. I could feel pressure in my ears, like the air had changed in the car, in a split second."

Massa, who manages restaurants in the Cincinnati area, said he pulled over immediately to see if he hit a deer, a dog, or something else. He found nothing, except the damages to the right-front bumper.