Fireball Spotted over Texas

Great balls of fire indeed.
Folks from Oklahoma City to Houston reported having seen a fireball shoot across the sky at about 8 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Astronomers said the fiery display was likely caused by a meteor or some other space matter hurtling through the atmosphere.
Texas observers blogged about the show and described it as a blue-green object trailing sparks.
In central Texas, Little River-Academy Police Chief Troy Hess said he had just pulled over a driver when he managed to capture video of the fireball from his cruiser.
"It kept getting bigger, and the color kept changing," he told the Austin American-Statesman.
No damage was reported from the fireball.
It was not clear whether any of the remnants fell to earth. Meteor sightings are common, with most burning up in the atmosphere and leaving scant debris, according to astronomers.
Anita Cochran, assistant director of the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, told the American-Statesman that Wednesday's fireball was most likely small space debris.
"The rare case is when it is something big," she said.
"It looked like a sparkler, almost," Lisa Coleman, who lives outside College Station, Texas, told local TV station KBTX.
"There was just this huge meteor-like rock falling across the sky and I thought, 'Wow, that's really huge to be a shooting star,' but it lasted about 12 to 15 seconds and it had a sparkling, flaring tail," Coleman said.
Texas A&M astronomy professor Nicholas Suntzeff told KBTX the meteor was not as huge as it appeared -- probably only about the size of a fist. He attempted to dispel some other meteor myths.
"If they do hit the earth, they are not hot, they are cold. ... There is the fire around them, but ... the meteor itself remains cold," Suntzeff said. "It almost never produces a fire when it hits the earth."
Suntzeff said the type of meteor that residents spotted, likely a bolide meteor, is both bright and rare -- most people will probably never see one again in their lifetime.
"Usually it's just a fraction of a second; here it was like five seconds or so. Again, I've only seen a few of those in my life. I wish I'd seen it," he said.
Another odd fact about this week's fireball: The sighting occurred on the ninth anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia falling to earth over east Texas.
[For the Record, 1:05 p.m., Feb.3: An earlier version of this post -- and its headline -- referred to the meteor as a meteorite. A meteorite is a portion of a meteor that reaches the Earth intact.]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2012/02/meteorite-sighting-oklahoma-texas.html

FireBall Spotted over Ontario

Researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Western Ontario are asking for the public’s help to find fragments of meteoric fireball that were seen in the southern Ontario sky on Monday evening.

The UWO astronomers say fragments of the meteor likely fell just north of Peterborough, near the town of Selwyn near the eastern end of Upper Stony Lake.

The cameras recorded a slow-moving fireball, estimated to be no bigger than a basketball, around 6 p.m. on Monday near Lake Erie, which then moved north-northeast, said Peter Brown, the director of UWO’s Centre for Planetary and Space Exploration.

The cameras were able to track the fireball’s descent for about 10 seconds travelling at 14 km per second. The meteor continued to penetrate deep into the atmosphere at an altitude of about 30 kilometres, which meant the fireball was “massive,” Mr. Brown said.

“The long duration of 10 seconds, along with the deep penetration and low velocity are all rare things. It suggests strongly that some rocks survived and made it to the ground,” he said.

Scientists are not often able to link meteors a particular orbit of the solar system, but Mr. Brown said this meteorite is linked to the orbit between Jupiter and Mars.

“When we can put it into a spatial context, it forms a powerful data set,” he said. He described finding a meteorite from the fireball captured by video as the equivalent of studying samples brought back from a space mission – where knowing where the object comes from helps to inform scientific understanding.

Most of the meteorites date back to the inception of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, said Ian Nicklin, the ROM’s mineralogy technician.

“They come from asteroids that were formed the same time as celestial planets such as the Earth,” he said. “A lot of them really haven’t changed much since that time, so they really are a glimpse back into our earliest periods of the solar system.”

Meteor recovery is rare in southern Ontario, Mr. Nicklin added. Most of the meteors crash into water bodies or in remote communities to the north.

“The last time we had a meteor like this was in 2009, when we put out a similar press release, and a lady came forward with a fragment that crashed into her SUV,” Mr. Brown said.

The fragments would likely be dark matte in colour and weigh no more than a few grams. The outer crust would appear melted and charred. People who think they may have found a meteorite fragment should contact the ROM, which is leading the recovery.