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Fireballs

Fireball 5

Newly discovered asteroid 2014 UR116 may threaten Earth


RT.com
Mon, 03 Nov 2014 18:57 UTC
Asteroid 2014 UR116
© Reuters/NASA
Moscow University's robotic telescope has discovered a massive asteroid that could potentially hit Earth in the future. If such a collision happens, the explosion would be 1,000 more powerful the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion in 2013.

An automatic telescope installed in Russia's Caucasus Mountains, near the city of Kislovodsk, first spotted the newly discovered space rock, dubbed 2014 UR116. The asteroid is estimated to be 370 meters in diameter, which is bigger than the size of the notorious Apophis asteroid.

Once Russian astronomers saw the new space object, they passed the data to colleagues at the Minor Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. That means many observatories around the world closely scrutinized 2014 UR116, which helped to calculate the object's preliminary orbit.

2014 UR116's orbit is fluctuating because it also passes close to Venus and Mars, and the gravitational pull of these planets can also influence the asteroid's trajectory.

When a meteorite exploded in the skies above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, the energy of the explosion was estimated to be equivalent to 300-500 kilotons of TNT. But the Chelyabinsk meteorite was relatively small, about 17 meters in diameter and it disintegrated with a blast at an altitude of over 20 kilometers.
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Fireball 5

Fireball over Alabama captured on video

Alyssa Newcomb
ABC News
Tue, 21 Oct 2014 10:40 UTC
Fireball
© Jason Reed/YouTube
The moment a bright light streaked across the night sky in Trussville, Alabama, was captured on video last night.

The sighting came as the Earth passed through the debris cloud from Halley's Comet, which produces the annual Orionid meteor shower.

Bill Cooke of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told ABC News there were "several bright Orionids last night, as well as a spectacular fireball over middle Tennessee" that he said broke apart at 24 miles altitude just south of Nashville.

Comment: Another possible angle of same fireball:



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Fireball 3

Iowa photographer accidentally captures a fireball explosion and smoke trail in his night sky time-lapse

DL Cade
PetaPixel
Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:00 UTC
Astronomers can wait decades to see or capture what Ben Lewis photographed by accident while shooting a time-lapse Ashton-Wildwood County Park, Iowa very early this morning. Called a 'bolide fireball,' what you see in the short time-lapse above is an exceptionally bright meteorite that explodes in a bright flash at its end, leaving behind this strange bright puff of red smoke.

To the untrained eye you would think a 'night fury' from How to Train Your Dragon just passed by, but this is in fact a natural phenomenon that, in real time, lasted an amazing 12 minutes!

Shot with a Canon 6D and 35mm lens at f/1.4 10 sec, and ISO 1600 with a 10 second delay between frames, Lewis was actually sleeping when this happened. When he came back to review the footage he initially thought it was an airplane, but upon closer inspection he realized it was much stranger than that.

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Fireball 5

Meteor fireball sets the sky on fire over Recife, Brazil


Metro, UK
Thu, 16 Oct 2014 19:29 UTC

The amazing moment a meteor lights up the sky above the Brazilian city of Recife has been caught on camera.

In the incredible clip, taken on Wednesday at around 10pm, the sky is illuminated with red and yellow light as the meteor crosses the sky.

Locals immediately took to social media to express their surprise at the awesome sight.

'A flaming ball broke apart as it fell towards the ground,' wrote one user on Facebook.

Comment: The above footage could be a transformer blow out, which may be connected to the widely observed fireball. Various cameras caught it:


Problem is, authorities in Recife didn't report a transformer blow-out... so the glowing 'after-effect' lights in the sky could be something else.

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Comet 2

'Fallstreak hole' in Perth sky puzzles locals

Amber Johnston
Perth Now
Wed, 08 Oct 2014 09:22 UTC
Image
© Glenn Rogers
Perth skies Tuesday morning
A mysterious cloud caused a stir over Perth this morning. Several PerthNow readers have woken to a sight described as "out of this world" after spotting a puzzling UFO-shaped cloud in the sky.

The unusual cloud formation even had experts baffled, with the Bureau of Meteorology taking some time to investigate what the strange phenomenon may be.

Comment: It seems that if the official hypothesis of fallstreak holes recounted above were true, the phenomena should occur more frequently with our cooling upper atmosphere and heavy air traffic. Besides the hypothesis does not account for the circular shape which seems more like a shock wave from above than ice crystals falling from a planes vapor trail. Consider the recent years exponential growth in incoming fireballs heavily impacting our upper atmosphere, a fact that mainstream science usually shies away from or tries to cover up with 'everything is normal and understood' stories, as demonstrated above. The probability of this phenomena being a product of incoming comet debris is high.

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Fireball 5

To find meteorites, listen to the legends of Australian aborigines

Sarah Zielinski
Smithsonian.com
Sat, 04 Oct 2014 00:12 UTC
Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve
© Flickr user Matthias Siegel
One of the 4,700-year-old impact craters at Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve in Australia.
In the heart of Australia, at a remote site south of Alice Springs, the land is pitted with about a dozen strange depressions. Don't drink the rainwater that pools there, or a fire devil will fill you with iron.

So goes one Aboriginal tale that has been passed down across generations. The site is the Henbury meteorite field, which was created about 4,700 years ago when a large, iron-filled meteorite slammed into Earth's atmosphere and broke apart, scattering fragments. The Aboriginal warning is perhaps one of the clearest examples of an oral tradition that has preserved the memory of an ancient meteorite strike, argues Duane Hamacher at the University of New South Wales in Australia. According to Hamacher, such tales may be vital clues pointing toward future finds.

"These traditions could lead to the discovery of meteorites and impact sites previously unknown to Western science," he writes in a paper that will appear in an upcoming issue of Archaeoastronomy and that was published online August 27.

Most myths and tales are just stories passed down through the ages, altered over time like a vast game of "Telephone." But some are based on actual geological or astronomical events that occurred long ago. The search for the truth behind those stories has inspired a field of science called geomythology.
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Fireball 3

Meteor over Canada caught on video


The Huffington Post B.C.
Thu, 02 Oct 2014 14:30 UTC

An Okanagan farmer who regularly takes photos of the sunrise captured a whole lot more this week when she spotted a meteor in the sky. Janette Casey Ewens, who owns Labyrinth Farms north of Kamloops, was in the barn yard at 6 a.m. on Monday when she saw a "thing" falling from above, she told The Huffington Post B.C.

"I ran back up to the house and grabbed my camera and snapped a few pics then hit the record button," she said in an email. "It happened twice a few minutes apart. The second time it happened faster."

The American Meteor Society received three reports of a fireball being spotted from West Kelowna, Cranbrook, and Three Hills in Alberta. Joanne Rosvick, an astronomer and associate professor at Thompson Rivers University, said it was likely space debris that perhaps came from a satellite, reported CFJC.
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Fireball 4

Meteor lights up Utah's early morning sky

Michael McFall
The Slat Lake Tribune
Thu, 02 Oct 2014 17:44 UTC
Image
© File photo
Rodger Fry had just picked up his morning newspaper, when he looked up at the constellation Orion - and saw something most unexpected. At about 4:32 a.m., the president of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society saw a green fireball soaring through the Thursday morning sky. Several others Fry talked to later saw the same thing.

"There was no sonic boom but it was quite large," said Fry, who lives near 5900 S. 800 West in Murray. "It looked like [the meteor] was ... a little smaller than the sun."

That silence tells experts like Fry that the meteor that lit up Utah's skies was likely far, far away from us. Patrick Wiggins, the NASA/JPL solar system ambassador to Utah, hasn't spoken to anyone who heard any sonic boom associated with the meteor.

Comment: See video footage below. Notice how the fireball just 'goes out' after the first flash. Fascinating!


A second video can be viewed here.

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Fireball 2

Meteor caught on Russian dash cam

Jason Major
Universe Today
Tue, 30 Sep 2014 20:00 UTC
Meteor
© Screen Capture
Thanks to the ubiquitousness of dashboard-mounted video cameras in Russia yet another bright object has been spotted lighting up the sky over Siberia, this time a "meteor-like object" seen on the evening of Saturday, Sept. 27.

The video above, shared today by RT.com, shows the object as it streaked toward the western horizon over the Kemerovo region of Siberia. Even through the glare of streetlights and oncoming car headlights it could easily be seen... as to exactly what it was, that's not yet known.
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Fireball 5

Meteor strikes may not be random

Stuart Gary
ABC Science, Australia
Mon, 29 Sep 2014 06:31 UTC
Meteor
© NASA
Scientists have found that meteor impacts are not random events but may occur as Earth passes through streams of meteoroids.
Meteor impacts are far less random than most scientists assumed, according to a new analysis of Earth-strike meteors.

The research, reported on the pre-press astrophysics website ArXiv.org, concluded that meteor impacts are more likely to occur at certain times of the year when Earth's orbit takes us through streams of meteoroids.

The majority of meteors analysed hit the Earth in the second half of the year, say the researchers, brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos of the Complutense University of Madrid.

"This lack of randomness is induced by planetary perturbations, in particular Jupiter's, and suggests that some of the recent, most powerful Earth impacts may be associated with resonant groups of Near Earth Objects and/or very young meteoroid streams," they report.

Meteoroid streams can be generated by the break-up of an asteroid or comet.

A planet or moon can also affect nearby asteroids and meteors, herding them into loose orbits called 'resonant streams', which can be broken up by big planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.

The study is based on 33 meteor impact events detected between 2000 and 2013 by infrasound acoustic pressure sensors, operated by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization.

The sensors are designed to detect clandestine nuclear tests, but also pick up meteor impacts with an explosive energy in excess of a thousand tonnes of TNT.
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