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Posted: 09-12-2010 09:28 Post subject:

Meteor fireball spotted in skies over Britain

Stargazers throughout the UK have reported seeing a meteor-like streak of light in the darkened skies.
The BBC was contacted by people in Scotland, the Midlands, Wales, and northern and south west England who saw the display at about 1740 GMT.

One witness driving home from work in Coventry said the light was a bit scary because it was so "incredibly bright".

Astronomers said the brightness of the meteor, a chunk of space rock burning up in the atmosphere, was unusual.
Dr David Whitehouse. astronomer and former BBC correspondent, said: "It's a bright meteor called a fireball, extraordinarily bright.
"This a chunk of space rock perhaps the size of your fist, perhaps a bit larger, that is burning up as it comes through our atmosphere at an altitude of 60 or 70 miles or so.
"So it sounds extraordinary if you're very lucky enough to have seen it; it's quite rare."

Tina Baxter was driving home when she spotted the meteor-like streak.
She told the BBC: "It was heading north and it appeared directly in front of me. It was travelling east to west.
"At first I thought it was a firework, but it was travelling at a funny angle - across then down.
"It was a bit scary because it was so massive and incredibly bright. When I got home, my brother was there, and he said he saw it as well.
"I would be surprised if anyone took pictures of it - it appeared for three seconds and then it was gone."

Keith Levitt, 67, from Aberffraw on Anglesey, said he went outside to empty shopping from the boot of his car at about 1740 GMT when he saw a bright light above.
He told the BBC: "Initially, I thought it was the light from a plane, then I suddenly realised it was a ball with bits coming away from it. I realised it was a meteor.
"It was a large object, I only saw it for two or three seconds. It was going in a low trajectory then petered out into nothing.
"I've never seen anything so large and so close. I've seen shooting stars but this was quite spectacular because it was so large."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11954932

More witness reports on page.

Posted: 09-12-2010 10:55 Post subject:

"Scientists said the major space event, which occurred at 5.35pm, was a likely precursor to the annual Geminids meteor shower, which is considered to be the best display of the year.

Astronomers say next week’s impressive space display will produce up to 60 explosions an hour at its peak. It will combine with the only total lunar eclipse of the year.

This year's Geminid meteor shower is expected to be the best display of so-called "shooting stars" and will peak during the overnight hours of Monday and Tuesday next week.

Professor Colin Pillinger, planetary scientist at Open University and head of Beagle 2 Mars lander project, said Wednesday night's event had left the astronomy world excited.
“It sounds like it’s going to be a good one this year,” he said. "

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8190171/Spectacular-meteor-fireball-explosion-over-Britain-leaves-stargazers-buzzing-ahead-of-Geminid-space-shower.html

(The Full Moon, when the eclipse will be greatest, is at 08:13 Tuesday, 21 December - but that's a week after the Geminid maximum!)

Posted: 09-12-2010 11:09 Post subject:

"up to 60 explosions an hour"

Explosions?! I bloody well hope not!

Posted: 13-01-2011 11:34 Post subject:

'Ball of fire': Pebble-sized meteorite above U.S. dazzles in night sky over seven states
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 9:14 AM on 13th January 2011

Streaking across the night sky, a stunning ball of fire shot across the south eastern part of the United States last night - dazzling stargazers with a bright flash.

Authorities say the mysterious flash of light - which could be seen from Oklahoma to the Florida panhandle - was most likely a meteorite.
The object, which was estimated at being no bigger than a pebble, was a stray bit of debris from a recent meteor shower.

Some reported a green tinge to the light, indicating that the rock may have contained traces of copper.
It was captured on camera by Bryan Bergon, who was out looking at the Orion constellation when he saw the bright light above.

The National Weather Service said they had received dozens of calls about the unidentified object in the sky.
Randle Drane, the Emergency Management Director in Copiah County, Mississippi, said residents who saw the light and heard a subsequent boom called to report what the incident.

'The volunteer fire department searched for whatever it was but didn’t come up with anything,' Mr Drane said.
The Sebastian County Sheriff's Office in Arkansas said the meteorite most likely hit near Poteau Mountain, Oklahoma.

Many reports incorrectly referred to the object as a meteor, rather than a meteorite. [?] The difference is whether the object strikes the Earth's surface.
If it vapourises in the Earth's atmosphere - or 'ablates' - it is a meteor. If it manages to reach the surface, it is a meteorite (a meteoroid is an object - too small to be an asteroid - which travels through space but does not enter the Earth's atmosphere).

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1346526/Meteorite-U-S-dazzles-night-sky-seven-states.html#ixzz1AuT93Wbf

The Mail has got its headline wrong - the thing seen in the sky was a meteor. Only if it actually reached the ground later would it be called a meteorite.

Posted: 16-01-2011 16:59 Post subject:

The Mail is almost certainly wrong in saying that the green colour is caused by copper- copper is quite rare in meteors, but the green colour is quite common. In fact the green is probably caused by excited atmospheric oxygen.

Posted: 16-01-2011 17:22 Post subject:

Posted: 04-03-2012 08:42 Post subject:

Meteor witnessed across Britain

Police forces say they have received a number of calls reporting what is believed to have been a meteor.
Reports of a "bright light" and an "orange glow" came in across the north of England and Scotland at about 21:40 GMT amid fears a plane had crashed.
The Met Office tweeted: "Hi All, for anyone seeing something in the night sky, we believe it was a meteorite."

Durham Police said air traffic control had confirmed there had not been any incidents of aircraft in difficulties.
A force spokeswoman said: "The sightings are believed to be either an asteroid burning out or similar which has been restricted to the upper atmosphere only."

Meteors are particles from space that burn up as they plummet through Earth's atmosphere, sometimes emitting light, creating a "fireball" effect.
Meteorites are larger, more durable objects that survive heating in the atmosphere and land on Earth. It is not known if that happened on Saturday.

Professor David Whitehouse, an astronomer, said: "Occasionally you get a very big piece of debris coming into the Earth's atmosphere and this causes a fireball.
"When you see this fireball breaking up, you're seeing the wreckage of a planet that couldn't form properly when the solar system was young and a bit of rock that has been orbiting the Sun for perhaps thousands of millions of years."

Adrian West, of Meteorwatch, said he had seen reports of sightings from Scotland to Devon.
He said he saw the meteor in Berkshire and believed it could have gone down in the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay.

Adam Hepworth, from Helensburgh, in Argyll, told the BBC: "I was leaving work and getting into my car and I noticed a really bright light moving slowly across the sky.
"At first I thought it was a sky lantern but then I realised it couldn't have been due to the speed that it was moving. I then thought perhaps it is a plane that had caught fire.
"I knew it was really odd and sat there for a few minutes just staring at it."

Grampian Police said many people had reported seeing a "flare or a bright object with a tail", while Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said it had received reports of a "large ball of fire in the sky".
Strathclyde Police said it had been "inundated" with calls, while Lothian and Borders Police also reported taking calls.

Hundreds of people tweeted about what they had seen and the Kielder Observatory, in Northumberland, said a "huge fireball" had been seen travelling from north to south over the county.
The Observatory posted on Twitter: "Of 30 years observing the sky #fireball best thing I have ever seen period."

Laura Yusuf, of Mitcham, in Surrey, said she saw the meteor while travelling on the M6.
"It was an amazing sight. Bright orange flames trailing behind it as it slowly burnt itself out," she told the BBC.

Another witness, who called BBC Radio 5 live's Stephen Nolan programme, said: "I looked up and saw these two huge tails of light coming off it and I thought it was a plane on fire going down into Edinburgh.
"It was massive, there was the red at the back of it, then these two huge white tails and then these blue bits at the very end."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-17248959

Posted: 12-03-2012 22:20 Post subject:

Posted: 22-04-2012 12:39 Post subject:

Out of this world, quite literally: The beautiful and mysterious Fukang meteorite
By Lyle Brennan
PUBLISHED: 16:45, 14 April 2012 | UPDATED: 16:45, 14 April 2012

When it slammed into the surface of Earth, there was little sign of the beauty that lay inside.
But cutting the Fukang meteorite open yielded a breathtaking sight.
Within the rock, translucent golden crystals of a mineral called olivine gleamed among a silvery honeycomb of nickel-iron.

The rare meteorite weighed about the same as a hatchback when it was discovered in 2000, in the Gobi Desert in China's Xinjiang Province.
It has since been divided into slices which give the effect of stained glass when the sun shines through them.
An anonymous collector holds the largest portion, which weighs 925lb. In 2008, this piece was expected to fetch $2million (£1.26million) at auction at Bonham's in New York - but it remained unsold.
It is so valuable that even tiny chunks sell in the region of £20-30 per gram.

Arizona's Southwest Meteorite Laboratory, which holds about 70lb of the rock, says the remarkable find will turn out to be 'one of the greatest meteorite discoveries of the 21st century'.
It says the Fukang specimen outshines all other known examples of the pallasite class, which makes up just one per cent of all meteorites. However, it is not the biggest - in 2005 space rock hunter Steve Arnold dug up a 1,400lb sample in Kansas.

The Arizona lab's experts say pallasites, whose make-up of half nickel-iron, half olivine gives them their mosaic-like appearance, are 'thought to be relics of forming planets'.
They are believed to originate from deep inside intact meteors created during the formation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago and very few specimens are thought to have survived their descent through Earth's atmosphere.
February 2005 saw the Chinese space rock transported all the way to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, in Tucson, Arizona.

The U.S. lab claims their polished slice of the original meteorite is the world's biggest pallasite cross section, measuring 36in by 19in.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2129747/The-beautiful-mysterious-Fukang-pallasite-meteorite.html#ixzz1slggIh77

Posted: 26-04-2012 17:54 Post subject:

Some meteor lore I've stumbled across.

The green color is often thought to indicate copper, however, it's actually an oxygen reaction.

Meteorites that reach the surface are not red hot, vast time spent in space has cold- sinked them so that only the very outer surface gets hot

Space junk often has a high copper content(wiring), and if the Kecksberg object was indeed a Soviet satellite, that might explain the green color. I saw that one, and it was indeed green, with bits detaching along the way, obviously breaking up. That does not make it artificial, natural objects break up,too.

The recent sonic boom and fall of stones is a classic Fortean event....Jefferson once said, "Stones do not fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky!"

Sorry, Mr. Jefferson!

Posted: 09-12-2012 08:15 Post subject:

Nasa camera captures 'fire-ball' over Texas
[video]
8 December 2012 Last updated at 18:35

Video footage of a "fire-ball" flashing in the sky over Texas has been captured by a Nasa camera.
The camera picked up the flash from Nasa's Meteoroid Environment Office in New Mexico. It was reported to have been seen from as far away as Houston and Louisiana.

Nasa believes that a meteor entered earth's atmosphere somewhere between Dallas and Houston. It has tracked fragments of it which fell to Earth north of Houston.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20654335

Posted: 22-12-2012 13:32 Post subject:

Posted: 03-01-2013 23:35 Post subject:

Rock is new class of Mars meteorite

A dark lump of rock found in the Moroccan desert in 2011 is a new type of Martian meteorite, say scientists.
Weighing 320g, the stone has been given the name Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034.
Its texture and chemistry set it apart from all previous objects picked up off the surface of Earth but known to originate on the Red Planet.

The researchers' analysis, reported online this week by Science magazine, shows the meteorite to be just over two billion years old.
The study was led by Carl Agee from the University of New Mexico, US.
"It has some resemblance to the other Martian meteorites but it's also distinctly different in other respects," he told BBC News, "both in the way it just looks in hand sample, but also in its elemental composition."

There are just over 100 Martian meteorites currently in collections worldwide. They were all blasted off the Red Planet by some asteroid or cometary impact, and then spent millions of years travelling through space before falling to Earth.
Their discovery was mostly chance (few were seen in the act of falling) but their dark forms mean they will have caught the eye of meteorite hunters who scour desert sands and polar ice fields for rare rocks that can trade for tens of thousands of dollars.

Virtually all the Martian meteorites can be put in one of three classifications referred to as Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny after key specimens. Scientists will often refer to these rocks simply as the SNC meteorites.
Prof Agee and colleagues argue that NWA 7034 now be put in its own class.

This rock is a basaltic breccia in character. It is made of a jumble of fragments that have been cemented back together in the high temperatures of a volcanic eruption. There are many examples of Moon meteorites that look this way, but no SNC ones.

Geochemically, NWA 7034 is dominated by alkali elements such as potassium and sodium. This is precisely what the robot rovers studying basalts down on the ground on Mars also see. This is not a trait seen in the SNC meteorites, interestingly.

Prof Agee's team also see much more water in the new meteorite - about 6,000 parts per million. That is about 10 times more water bound into the rock than is the case in the most water-rich SNC specimens.
This says something about the environment in which the rock formed, indicating there was a much greater abundance of water to interact with the basalt.

"This rock is from two billion years ago and a lot of the SNCs are from only about 200-400 million years ago," explained Prof Agee.
"And of course those most recent times on Mars have witnessed a cold, dry planet with a thin atmosphere. A lot of people believe that early Mars, on the other hand, was a lot warmer and a lot wetter, and maybe even a harbour for life.
"So, what happened in between? When did this transformation to drier conditions occur? Well, NWA 7034, because of its greater age, may be able to address those questions."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20900843

Posted: 09-05-2013 08:31 Post subject:

Large meteor spotted in night sky in England and Wales

A meteor has been spotted travelling across the night sky by people in many parts of England and Wales.
Sightings of the celestial body were reported on Twitter in areas such as Cornwall, Hampshire, Lancashire, south Wales and Worcestershire.
Suzy Buttress, of Basingstoke, described witnessing the meteor as a "once in a lifetime thing".

Space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock said the phenomenon was likely to have been debris from Halley's Comet.

Ms Buttress, who was driving home on the M3 when she saw the meteor, told the BBC: "It was amazing, so big, bigger than a shooting star. It had a strange greenish tinge to it, with a definite tail behind it.
"This was definitely a ball with a tail. It took its time going across the sky. It went behind a cloud, then came out the other end.
"At first I hoped it wasn't an aircraft crashing. It's a once in a lifetime thing."

Richard Escott, a security supervisor for the BBC in Cardiff, explained what he saw.
"I was standing outside having a bit of fresh air and as I turned round I saw this very bright blue light which was dimming," he said.
"It was coming very steadily, progressing across the night sky, but it was at sort of building level and then died out to nothing. I saw it for about five, 10 seconds."

Dr Aderin-Pocock explained what could have caused the spectacle.
"Unfortunately I didn't see this meteor myself, but I think what's unusual is the size of this one. With meteor showers people will see a number of meteors over an hour, so let's say six or 10 an hour.
"It seems that this one was particularly large and particularly bright, which is why it's caught so much attention.
"It's quite likely to be part of the Eta Aquarids, which is the debris left by Halley's Comet.

"And twice a year we pass through the debris left behind by the comet and when this happens we see more of these shooting stars but there must have been a large lump left behind which is what caused such a bright meteor to be seen."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22460642