Fireballs
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Question

Mysterious bangs heard in Auckland

Mystery Boom
© www.stuff.co.nzWhat was the unexplained bang heard in Auckland on Saturday night?
A mysterious loud explosion has stumped residents of Auckland's central suburbs as to what it could be.

The banging was reportedly heard on Saturday around 11.30pm.

Police say they had no reports of anything that may have caused such an explosion, other than fireworks being let off.

The noise was heard in the Mt Albert, Mt Roskill and Three Kings area - as well as far away as Waterview to the west and Papakura to the south.

Resident Ash Ball said there was a massive explosion which woke up the neighbourhood. "It shook our house and woke us up with a hell of a fright."

But some residents are convinced something more untoward is going on.

One person tweeted that it sounded like a bomb exploding while another emailed to Stuff declaring it to have been a sonic boom.

In June last year, a series of mysterious "explosions" were reported across west and north Auckland leaving police mystified then as well.

Those explosions turned out to be Defence Force training exercises at the Kaipara Bomb Range.

Fireball

Massive fireball explodes in the sky over Puerto Montt, Chile

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Giant fireball disintegrates over Puerto Montt, Chile.
What was the terrifying light in the sky over Puerto Montt, Chile on May 11, 2015?

Most probably a giant fireball exploding and creating this amazing flash in the sky!

This explosion disintegration occurred during the night between monday and tuesday.


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Pictures showing the sky suddenly being illuminated by a strange flash of light

Meteor

'Flying rocks from a quarry' (right!) damage homes, businesses in Virginia

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Bob Ryan was driving to get a cup of coffee in Sterling, Va., on Thursday morning when he saw rocks the size of baseballs shower out of the sky.

"They hit, and then smaller ones hit in succession like, 'boom, boom, boom,'" Ryan said.

At first, Ryan thought maybe kids hiding in a treeline were pelting cars. But he noticed that the rocks appeared to have rained down from the clouds, as if they were meteors.

Laura Rinhart, a Loudoun County firefighter, said that the rocks likely were not from outer space and had instead come flying from a nearby rock quarry. Rinehart said that some rocks struck a home on Old Ox road and debris also hit the pavement near Oakgrove Rd.

A person who answered the phone at Loudoun Quarries on Thursday said he was not sure if the rocks came from their quarry, the only quarry in the area.

Some residents in the area heard a boom at around 10:30 a.m. that they thought sounded like thunder. Ryan said that stones then blasted car windows and damaged vehicles in a shopping center parking lot. He said he picked up some of the rocks and noticed that they had a burnt smell.

"One rock double the size of a softball was sitting on the sidewalk in front of a beauty salon," Ryan said. "If it had gone through there would have been lots of casualties."


Comment: In relation to the rock quarry, Old Ox Road is 3-5 miles West of the quarry, other locations reported are 2 miles or so East of the rock quarry. Why not rocks North, South, East and West? There isn't enough information to know for sure, but this seems fishy!


Comment: This story is a bit farfetched and reads like damage control. Here's another piece from USA Today with video of a rock coming from the sky. Would a controlled blast also create a burnt smell on the rocks?
The smell that is being given off by this meteorite is hard to describe. When I first smelt it, I tried to think of the proper words to describe the odor. I tried to think of things that had a similar smell:

"like hot metal, or like a cast-iron skillet that has over-heated, or like the metal filaments when you first turn on an electric heater.
Also, a lot like when you make sparks by striking two flint-rocks against each other.
Maybe a little like ozone, but with a more smoky, sulfurous aroma."

That's when the phrase "burnt gunpowder" came into my mind.

Source: Meteorite Times
And...
Chelyabinsk. Meteor Smells

A group of four observers of the Leonid meteor shower of 1833 reported a peculiar odour, "like sulphur or onions."

It was thought that "This apparent transmission of smells at the speed of light could be explained if they were due to nitrous oxide or ozone produced by an electric discharge." (Ozone [O3] a gas. From the Greek, ozein, for smell). Observers of the Texas fireball of 1 October 1917 also reported the odour of sulphur and burning powder as it passed.

A possible explanation is suggested by the following Chelyabinsk observer reports.

Field survey reports of smells were concentrated in the area surrounding the fireball trajectory. After an initial strong burst, the smells continued for a few hours. The eastern edge of this area coincides with the eastern edge of the glass damaged area. Arkhangel'skoe is the most western village where smells were reported. It is situated near the western edge of the glass damaged area. Fourteen villages reported similar smells, with nearly all described as a sulphur smell, a burning smell, or a smell similar to that of gunpowder.

These smells may have originated from the decomposition of Troilite (FeS), an iron sulphide mineral named after Domenico Troili, who first noted it in a meteorite that fell at Albareto, Modena, Italy in 1766. Troilite is one of the main components of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. Some burning smells may also have been caused locally when the shockwave dispersed soot from flues and stoves.

Respondents in Emanzhelinka, immediately under the fireball trajectory, also reported an ozone smell, similar to the smell after a thunderstorm. Ozone, with nitrogen oxides as by products, may have been produced in the immediate surroundings of the fireball by Ultra-Violet (UV-B λ= 290-320 nm wavelength) radiation from the meteor. This reinforces reports about sunburn caused by UV radiation from the fireball.

Source: Engineering and Technology Wiki
It's more likely space rocks coming into our atmosphere and the government owned media does not want the people to know they are about to be bombarded back to the Stone Age. What slimeballs.

Read Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction! and read our Comets and Catastrophe Series for more details.


Fireball 4

Meteor blamed for loud boom over New Zealand

Fireball Over Omanawa
© Screen Capture
A picture of two near earth meteors taken near Omanawa this week is being offered as an explanation for mysterious bangs heard in the sky over the lower Kaimai area.

Omanawa resident and EOL CEO Terry Coles heard what sounded like two large explosions last Saturday night. He wondered at the time if they were sonic booms from a meteor.

His suspicions were confirmed on Tuesday when he set up a camera on the balcony to take continuous exposures for a timelapse video he's working on about the night sky over the Kaimais.

"I left the camera running as I needed several thousand consecutive images and went inside where it was warm," says Terry.

"Just after 11pm I heard three more explosions in quick succession, louder this time as if they were close by."

Suspecting he had missed something special he sifted through hundreds of images from Tuesday night and found something in just one frame.

Fireball 2

Fireball captured on camera over Tenerife, Canary Islands

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Meteorite captured on camera by Slovakian observatory in the Canaries
A spectacular image was captured on camera by the AMOS project near Los Cristianos in Tenerife at 23.17 on Tuesday when a meteor illuminated the sky as it hurtled towards Earth.

The meteor, which was first spotted when it was still 83 kilometres away from the planet, disintegrated 25.2 kilometres from the Earth's surface, and was snapped by the cameras of the AMOS project in the observatory of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias Teide y Roque de los Muchachos.

The AMOS (All-Sky Meteor Orbit System) project has been up and running for only two months, and every night scans the sky in search of meteors using two detectors located 140 kilometres apart in Tenerife and La Palma. These devices can calculate the exact orbits and trajectories of the bodies they detect.

The technology was developed by the Astronomical and Geophysical Observatory of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics at the Comenius University in Slovakia, and won a gold medal at the INVENTO 2013 exhibition. Its intended use is for improving meteor and meteorite detection and prediction systems, and in future it is planned to install similar equipment in Chile in order to allow the southern skies to be monitored as well.

Fireball 2

Aboriginal legends reveal ancient secrets to science

Meteor
© BBCMeteor streaks across the sky against a field of star.
Scientists are beginning to tap into a wellspring of knowledge buried in the ancient stories of Australia's Aboriginal peoples. But the loss of indigenous languages could mean it is too late to learn from them.

The Luritja people, native to the remote deserts of central Australia, once told stories about a fire devil coming down from the Sun, crashing into Earth and killing everything in the vicinity.

The local people feared if they strayed too close to this land they might reignite some otherworldly creature.

The legend describes the crash landing of a meteor in Australia's Central Desert about 4,700 years ago, says University of New South Wales (UNSW) astrophysicist Duane Hamacher.

It would have been a dramatic and fiery event, with the meteor blazing across the sky. As it broke apart, large fragments of metal-rich rock would have crashed to Earth with explosive force, creating a dozen giant craters.

The Northern Territory site, which was discovered in the 1930s by white prospectors with the help of Luritja guides, is today known as the Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve.

Bulb

Researchers: Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago may have caused Deccan Traps' vast lava flow

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© Gerta Keller
The Deccan Traps in India - between 17° - 24° North and 73° - 74° East - are a place where you can find layer upon layer of solidified rock. This region is thought to have been the site of extremely powerful volcanic activity in the past, so powerful that it caused mile-deep lava over an area as large as the state of California. Last week (April 30, 2015) geophysicists at UC Berkeley announced their evidence that this vast region is related to the asteroid thought to have slammed into the ocean half a world away. The impact near Chicxulub, Mexico - 66 million years ago - is believed by many researchers to have killed the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals. The Berkeley researchers say the impact probably "rang the Earth like a bell," triggering powerful earthquakes and volcanos around the globe, including those that created the Deccan Traps.

The Berkeley researchers - who published their work online April 30 in the The Geological Society of America Bulletin - cited the "uncomfortably close" coincidence between the Deccan Traps eruptions and the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. Team leader Mark Richards of UC Berkeley said in a statement:
If you try to explain why the largest impact we know of in the last billion years happened within 100,000 years of these massive lava flows at Deccan ... the chances of that occurring at random are minuscule.
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© UC BerkeleyIllustration of a hot mantle plume “head” pancaked beneath the Indian Plate. The theory by Richards and his colleagues suggests that existing magma within this plume head was mobilized by strong seismic shaking from the Chicxulub asteroid impact, resulting in the largest of the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions.
Richards had proposed in 1989 that plumes of hot rock, called "plume heads," rise through Earth's mantle every 20-30 million years and generate huge lava flows, called flood basalts, like the Deccan Traps. It struck him as more than coincidence that the last four of the six known mass extinctions of life occurred at the same time as one of these massive eruptions.

Comment: See also: Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!


Fireball

Fireball seen in Eatontown, New Jersey

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© Associated PressSightings of a meteor like this one, photographed over the Arizona desert in 2001, were reported at the Jersey Shore and along the Northeastern U.S. Friday night, May 1.
There were numerous reports of a meteor streaking across the night sky late Friday.

Dora Marcouiller said she saw it while she was driving in Eatontown about 9:40 p.m.

"It flew southeast/northwest. It was as clear as day and crossed the top of the tree line. I saw the ball illuminating the sky with the tail of burning fire behind. It was huge and very distinct," the Eatontown resident said in an email to the Asbury Park Press.

Most meteors, or shooting stars, are visible as brief streaks of light. Marcouiller's description appears to match that of a "fireball," an unusually large and bright meteor. To be considered a fireball, a meteor must be at least as bright as Venus, according to an article from Geology.com.

Meteor-related websites reported sightings from Quebec, Canada to Maryland Friday night.

Fireball

Fireball spotted over Peterborough, Canada

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A meteor. (File photo)
A fireball was seen over Peterborough's north end early Wednesday morning.

The meteor was bright light green in colour and split into two parts as it fell through the atmosphere, and could be seen for just a few seconds, around 1:58 a.m. Wednesday.

But unlike the loud daytime meteor heard nearly a year ago in Peterborough, there was no sound associated with Wednesday's fireball.

The fireball was also spotted at that time from Montreal, according to the American Meteor Society.

Meteor sightings were also reported to the American Meteor Society at 1:51 a.m. Wednesday from Niagara Falls, N.Y. and at 2:03 a.m. Wednesday from Ontario.

The Eta Aquariids is the current major meteor shower. It lasts until May 19 with a peak of May 6 and 7.

The April Rho Cygnids and the H Virginids showers were also active on Wednesday, according to the American Meteor Society.

Fireball

Fireball lights up the sky in East Lancashire, UK

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© Steve Hooks Steve Hooks caught the 'fireball' on camera
The East Lancashire sky lit up briefly under the glare of a huge falling fireball last night — sparking fears of a 'plane crash or the end of the world'!

The large meteor was spotted by several residents at around 10.10pm as it fell over the north west on what was a clear, crisp night.

Denise Kennedy-Scott was in her garden close to Blackburn Rugby Club when she spotted the fireball.

She said: "I was looking across the field and looked up to see what looked like a white shooting star to start with, but as it got closer — and it was moving slowly — it got bigger and bigger.