Fireballs
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Question

People in southern Alabama report loud booming noise

Boom over Alabama
© WKRG
News 5 is getting reports of a loud boom over Mobile County. Mobile Fire even responded to a call of a possible explosion, but found nothing. From reports to our newsroom the boom was heard in Mobile and Grand Bay, Semmes, Daphne and other areas.

The most plausible explanation is a sonic boom from a military jet since there are many along the Gulf Coast.

NASA also said on Twitter it was conducting supersonic tests near Galveston Texas

There was however a Space-X rocket launch about the same time. It's not clear that's what everyone was hearing. Some of the reports into our newsroom would coincide with that time, but others were much earlier. The rocket launch was about 2:46 Central time according to Space-X's YouTube channel.

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Blue meteor fireball streaks over Texas, sonic boom reported

Texas meteor fireball
© K. Palivec, AMS
Texas is fully living up to shining "big and bright" after it appears a meteor streaked across the sky Thursday night.

In the Killeen area, video from Christopher Cato shows the burst of light caught on his dash camera as it traveled through the atmosphere.

Others in central Texas said they heard a loud boom.

One woman in Hempstead told ABC13 meteorologist Travis Herzog she spotted the blue flash, which bloomed into a turquoise jewel tone as it raced across the night sky.

Viewer Mary Ann Miron reported that she saw something unusual explode in the sky around 9:30 p.m. west of Highway 6 on FM 1736.

"A giant ball like a meteorite changed the rainbow spectrum of colors until it turned into a beautiful turquoise," Miron said. "I've seen shooting stars, but this was HUGE and colorful!"


Question

Kaboom! Residents report loud boom in Natchez, Mississippi

Mystery boom in Natchez, MS
© fairviewinn.com
Several residents of downtown Natchez said they heard a loud boom noise in the area at approximately 11 p.m. Tuesday.

"Did anyone else hear that super loud noise downtown Natchez?!" Sarah Lindsey Laukhuff posted on social media Tuesday night not long after she said she heard the noise.

Laukhuff's social media post generated several responses with a few people commenting saying they also had heard the noise.

"People said it could have been a transformer," Laukhuff said Wednesday afternoon. "I heard it. It was one big kaboom!"

Laukhuff, who lives on South Commerce Street, said some of her neighbors called her last night saying they had heard the noise, too.

Info

Giant impact crater found under Greenland ice, possibly 12,000 years old - UPDATE

Greenland impact crater
© Kjær, et alThe Greenland impact crater, superimposed over Paris.
Scientists have discovered a crater beneath Greenland's Hiawatha Glacier that they say could be one of the 25 largest impact structures on Earth.

It's a 31-kilometre-wide circular bedrock depression up to a kilometre below the ice and was likely caused by a fractionated iron asteroid about a kilometre wide.

Its impact would have had substantial environmental consequences in the Northern Hemisphere and perhaps even more widely, say the researchers, led by led by Kurt Kjær from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The crater is the only one of its size that retains a significant portion of its original surface topography.


Comment: The Guardian reports a few more intriguing details:
Crater appears to be result of mile-wide iron meteorite just 12,000 years ago

Nasa/Cryospheric Sciences Lab/Natural History Museum of Denmark
An illustration of the ice-filled crater discovered in Greenland.
A huge impact crater has been discovered under a half-mile-thick Greenland ice sheet.

The enormous bowl-shaped dent appears to be the result of a mile-wide iron meteorite slamming into the island at a speed of 12 miles per second as recently as 12,000 years ago.

The impact of the 10bn-tonne space rock would have unleashed 47m times the energy of the Little Boy nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It would have melted vast amounts of ice, sending freshwater rushing into the oceans, and blasted rocky debris high into the atmosphere.

At 19.3 miles wide, the crater ranks among the 25 largest known on Earth and is the first to be found beneath an ice sheet.

"You have to go back 40 million years to find a crater of the same size, so this is a rare, rare occurrence in Earth's history," said Kurt Kjær, of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

Scientists first suspected a crater in 2015 when they spotted a huge depression in Nasa radar images of the bedrock beneath the Hiawatha glacier in north-west Greenland. Kjær, who passes a 20-tonne meteorite to reach his office every day, wondered if such a space rock might be the culprit. "It all snowballed from there," said Joseph MacGregor, a senior scientist on the team at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

greenland crater
It so happened that researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany were about to test a powerful new ice-penetrating radar system that was operated from the air. In May 2016 the scientists flew over the Hiawatha glacier and used the radar to map the underlying rock in unparalleled detail.

The images revealed all the hallmarks of an impact crater. "It became very clear that this was a circular feature with a rim around it and an elevated central region," said Kjær. The basin itself was more than 300 metres deep, according to a report in the journal Science Advances.

To search for solid proof of an impact, the researchers flew out to the glacier and collected sediments that had washed from the crater on to a nearby floodplain. Among the gathered grains, the scientists found particles of shocked quartz and other materials that are typically produced by the violence of a extraterrestrial impact. Geochemical tests of the grains suggest the meteorite was made of iron.

So far it has been impossible to put a firm age on the crater, but its condition suggests it formed after ice began to cover Greenland about 3 million years ago. But the crater may have formed much more recently. The radar images show that while the surface layers of the glacier immediately above the crater look normal, deeper layers that are older than 12,000 years are badly deformed and strewn with rocks, with some lumps as big as trucks.

"When it happened is the $64,000 question," said MacGregor. For a final answer, the researchers will need to drill through half a mile of ice and collect crater material for dating, or wait for rocks from the impact basin to be brought to the surface as the glacier flows to the sea. Either way, the scientists have a wait on their hands.

"We live on a planet where you can survey anything and you think you know everything," said Kjær. "But when you see such a big thing as this hiding in plain sight, you realise that the age of discovery is not over yet."
And for more on the evidence of what was happening back then, check out: Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes


Meteor

Two mystery 'explosions' heard across large parts of Doncaster, UK

Mysterious explosions in Doncaster, UK
© Doncaster Free Press
Two mystery 'explosions' were heard across large parts of Doncaster early this morning.

People across town reported hearing two loud bangs with residents in Edenthorpe, Kirk Sandall and Barnby Dun among those hearing the noise between 5.30am and 6am.

On Facebook, Fiona Stocks wrote: "what the hell were those two explosion sounds just now? They were too loud for a firework surely."

Nicola Bloore said: "I heard them as well," and Hilary Clayton said: "We heard them as well couldn't make out what they were."

Sharon Williamson posted: "Same sounds I heard last week too at about 4.50."

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Astronomers spot 2 meteor fireballs in 2 hours over southern Spain - 4 for the region in November

space rocks
© Shutterstock
Astronomers at an observatory in Central Spain said they spotted two pieces of debris from space falling over the skies of southern Spain yesterday (Sunday).

Scientists at the La Hita observatory in Toledo said the fireballs, one a comet and the other an asteroid, fell within around two hours of each other.

They were also sighted by observers in the Calar Alto observatory in Almeria Province and those at the Granada Province-based La Sagra.

The first debris fell over Spain at around 2.08am yesterday morning. A University of Huelva team who analysed footage of it said it travelled over Andalucia at around 72,000 kilometres per hour before breaking up about 42 kilometres above Jaen Province.


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Meteor fireball caught on camera in Loughborough, UK

FIREBALL
A fireball - thought to be an exploding meteor - has been spotted in the sky over Leicestershire.

Amateur astronomer Derek Robson captured the spectacle from his back garden in Loughborough.

Dr Robert Massey, deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, confirmed the footage appeared to show a genuine fireball.

He said they occur in the UK a number of times each year but they were difficult to predict, so witnessing one or capturing it on camera came down to being in the right place at the right time.


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Bright meteor fireball on Nov.11 over Jaén, Spain - 3rd for the month in the region

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
This bright meteor event was spotted over southern Spain on 11 Nov. 2018 at 2:08 local time (1:08 universal time). It was generated by a rock from an asteroid that hit the atmosphere at about 72,000 km/h. The meteor overflew the province of Jaén.

It began at an altitude of about 90 km and ended at a height of around 42 km.

The event was recorded in the framework of the SMART project (University of Huelva) from the meteor-observing stations located at La Hita (Toledo), Calar Alto (Almeria), La Sagra (Granada) and Sevilla.


Comment: For details of the 2 other records, see: Meteor fireball over the south of Spain brighter than the full moon

Bright meteor fireball shoots across the sky of Andalusia, Spain - Second for the region within 28 hours


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Video taken of meteor fireball near Lexington, Kentucky

fireball
Dust associated with Comet Encke hits the Earth's atmosphere at 65,000 mph creating the Taurid meteor shower. Video of fireball near Lexington, KY taken Thursday, November 8th.

The Taurids are actually two separate showers, with a Southern and a Northern component. The Southern Taurids originated from Comet Encke and are active from September 10th to November 20th. They are known for being rich with fireballs. By the way, a fireball is just another word for a meteor brighter than the planet Venus. Despite the fact that we are past peak, Ron Malinowski saw this a couple hours ago looking north from Lexington, KY...



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Bright meteor fireball shoots across the sky of Andalusia, Spain - Second for the region within 28 hours

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
The fragment extinguished around 63 kilometers above the municipality of Pueblo Blanco in Almeria

This is the moment a comet fragment turned into a fireball over Andalucia.

A piece of the Encke comet entered Earth's atmosphere at more than 100,000km/hr.

According to the Astrohita Foundation, the fireball was visible from 400km away and was detected by observatories in Granada and Sevilla.


Comment: The night prior to this event another unusually luminous fireball also fell over the region, see: Meteor fireball over the south of Spain brighter than the full moon

The first occurred on the 3rd of November and the second on the 4th (see time stamp on the video above).