Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like a meteor.
Or space trash, but I'm leaning meteor.
Does space trash look particularly distinctive when it makes back to earth? Human made space trash to be specific.
Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#52Are we having lately many more meteor sightings than "before", or is it just that we have better tools/more cameras to spot it?
Around 2003, I was driving home from San Francisco back to Danville late at night. After the 580 tunnel, as I crested the hill, the entire sky lit up bright green and I saw a huge glowing ball like this that lasted for a few seconds. These days, I'd have dashcam footage to show you. I was driving alone and the roads were pretty much empty, and it's kind of weird when something so unusual happens and you feel like the…
> kind of weird when something so unusual happens and you feel like the only one who saw it.
I was camping at a river with some friends some time ago in the summer, and we saw some meteor drawing a huge long line in the sky, it lasted quite a bit of time. Enough for me to call for my friends to get up and look at it, and they both saw it as well. Could never find any news about it though. Never seen anything like it since then.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#53Are we having lately many more meteor sightings than "before", or is it just that we have better tools/more cameras to spot it?
People have had ubiquitous cameras in their phones for a decade, but these fireballs happen way too fast to whip out your phone. The reason that we're seeing them more these days is because of the increasing prevalence of dashcams and home security cameras.
That's probably why the Russian one is so well documented. They have a dashcam culture
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do meteors ever hit the atmosphere at low speed?
While the odds of what I'm about to describe are astronomically (pun intended) low, I can see the following occurring: - earth moves in its orbit - meteor is moving in a straight line - that line is perfectly parallel to a point on the earth's orbit - the earth and the meteor basically link up and the speeds match so precisely that the meteor just goes into orbit
There's also the very low possibility of something just skipping along the upper atmosphere and ricocheting back into space.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#55Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an experience a bit like that, but with mini-tornadoes, somewhere along the M11 in the UK (Essex I think, but perhaps the edge of Cambs). I recall looking it up afterwards and it seemed to be 'a thing', though none of the news examples I found from various years before the event were anything like as extreme - tens and tens of them, well-formed. A truly bizarre 'what is happening' experience for me - before tha…
" the UK gets an average of 30-50 tornadoes a year. That’s more tornadoes per land area than anywhere else in the world (except – weirdly – the Netherlands.) " https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3QTh1mRGDNg16cDYHg... I too would've said we never get them here, apart from remembering one big one in the news I think in or near Birmingham...
Citation needed. Oklahoma averages over 50 per year and is 2/3rds the land area of the UK.[0]
[0] https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata-ok-monthlyannual
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#57The most common metallic meteors are iron-nickel, so green is a common color. This glow tends to be brightest when meteors hit the atmosphere at high speed.
Do meteors ever hit the atmosphere at low speed?
Yes, relatively speaking.
First likely hit I found:
"Meteors enter the atmosphere at speeds ranging from 11 km/sec...to 72 km/sec ... The wide range in meteoroid speeds is caused partly by the fact that the Earth itself is traveling at about 30 km/sec (67,000 mph) as it revolves around the sun. On the evening side, or trailing edge of the Earth, meteoroids must catch up to the earth’s atmosphere to cause a meteor, and tend to be slow. On the morning side, or leading edge of the earth, meteoroids can collide head-on with the atmosphere and tend to be fast."
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do meteors ever hit the atmosphere at low speed?
While the odds of what I'm about to describe are astronomically (pun intended) low, I can see the following occurring: - earth moves in its orbit - meteor is moving in a straight line - that line is perfectly parallel to a point on the earth's orbit - the earth and the meteor basically link up and the speeds match so precisely that the meteor just goes into orbit
Well presumably meteors travel at different speeds in outer space, and some meteors could be regarded as high speeds and others at low speeds. I don't think you necessarily have to be in synchronization with Earth's orbit to be considered low speed relative to some reasonable perspective.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
11.2 km/sec at a minimum. (Earth's escape velocity!)
It's not immediately obvious to me – why would escape velocity also be the minimum speed at which an object could enter the atmosphere?
Indeed. What if the object was traveling at the same speed as Earth as it revolves around the Sun, and their paths intersect at a very acute angle? That is to say, they met at a traffic 'zipper' ... Could an object collide with earth at a lower speed?
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do meteors ever hit the atmosphere at low speed?
While the odds of what I'm about to describe are astronomically (pun intended) low, I can see the following occurring: - earth moves in its orbit - meteor is moving in a straight line - that line is perfectly parallel to a point on the earth's orbit - the earth and the meteor basically link up and the speeds match so precisely that the meteor just goes into orbit
You haven't accounted for the massive gravity well that is the sun. The difference in potential energy from infinity to the radius of Earths orbit is GMm/r. Set that equal to momentum (.5mv^2) and you get sqrt(2GM/r). Plug in the numbers and you'll see you can't really have a meteor that stumbled in from outside the solar system with a similar velocity to Earths orbit by the time it came down to Earths orbit. Put another way, if it was moving slow enough for the speeds to basically match, it would also be in an orbit around the sun similar to our own, and you'd have to account for the missing potential energy it had before entering our stars gravity well. If you want to argue it came from within the solar system, it would have to have already been in an Earth like orbit this whole time, so why don't we see it?