Have you ever gone outside on a cold, clear night to watch a meteor shower and witness a super-bright fireball racing across the sky so brilliantly that you could swear you could hear it? Turns out the sizzling noise might not have been all in your head after all…but rather on it. (And here’s science to prove it.)
Tag: meteor
Chelyabinsk: a Blast From the Not-Too-Distant Past (or, How’s That Space Program Coming Along?)
Four years ago today an explosion shattered the morning sky over the Chelyabinsk region in southwestern Russia, the result of a 60-foot-wide fragment of an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere at over 40,000 mph and brilliantly blowing itself to smithereens at 97,000 feet up. Even at that altitude, the resulting flash of light and air blast was powerful…
Fireball Explodes Over Russia… Again
Why does Russia seem to get so many bright meteors? Well, at 6.6 million square miles it’s by far the largest country in the world plus, with dashboard-mounted cameras being so commonplace (partly to help combat insurance fraud) mathematically it just makes sense that Russians would end up seeing more meteors, and then be able to…
Meteor Strike: Can We Spot The Next Big Asteroid in Time?
On the morning of February 15, 2013, around 9:26 a.m. local time, the sky above the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk was sliced by a bright streak of light, ending in a flash brighter than the Sun and sending glass-shattering shockwaves thundering across the region several minutes later, breaking windows and injuring over 1,000 people. The…
Apocalypse? NO. (Despite What Chevy Says)
So the buzz is buzzing about Chevy’s Super Bowl ad and its tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the aftermath from the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. Of course the message is typical — drive a Chevy truck and survive, drive anything else and perish. Which is cute and of course the production value is high, but the problem is…
No Doom in 2012: Stop the Insanity!
Now that’s we’re officially three days into 2012, the ‘net is already abuzz with talk of impending doom on December 21 of this year. Luckily there are plenty of science sources that are more than happy to offer fact-based consolation that there is no actual evidence that anything cosmically bad is expected to occur on…
Meteor? Darn near killed ‘er.
The bright “fireball” on Jupiter captured on camera the morning of June 3 by amateur astronomers Anthony Wesley and Christopher Go (a still image from Anthony’s video is above, rotated and cropped) is now believed to have been a meteor burning up high in the planet’s atmosphere, and not an impact like the July 2009…
Fire in the Sky
New video…lots more angles: Just after 10pm last night a huge meteor lit up the skies over Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and several other midwestern states, inciting calls into local police and news stations from thousands of witnesses. The video above shows footage from various locations and cities…some really incredible stuff! It’s incredible how bright it…
Fire in the Sky
Around 6pm local time, February 3 2009, a large fireball was seen in the evening skies over Ireland. First video of the blazing meteor can be seen above. Reports are coming in that the “desk-sized” meteor may have landed in a field. It may be a piece of a larger object that exploded in the…
Party Like It’s 2012
In light of all the curiosity and theories regarding the most recent world-ending cataclysm anticipated for the year 2012 (seems like there’s a new expiration date every decade or so), I thought I’d post a nicely informative article from the NASA FAQ page from last Friday, November 6. (No time? Bottom line…..regardless of the world’s…
News Post: Fire in the Sky
Video of a fiery chunk of material falling to Earth was captured Sunday, February 15th in Austin, TX during local Channel 8 news coverage of the Austin Marathon. While some initially thought it may be debris from the recent collision of a U.S. and Russian satellite, the FAA is saying it was in fact a…
Lights in the Dark 