Posted on 03/22/2013 11:05:49 PM PDT by 444Flyer
A bright meteor briefly outshined the lights of New York City Friday evening (March 22), according to reports by witnesses who used Twitter and the Internet to report sightings of the fireball streaking over a broad stretch of the U.S. East Coast.
"Strange Friday night … a meteor passed over my house tonight!" wrote one New Yorker writing as Yanksmom19.
The first fireball sightings came at about 8 p.m. EDT (0000 March 23 GMT) and sparked more than 500 witness reports to the American Meteor Society. Reports of the meteor flooded Twitter from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.
"The witnesses range from along the Atlantic Coast ranging from Maine to North Carolina," Robert Lunsford, the society's fireball coordinator, wrote in an update. "This object was also seen as far inland as Ohio."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
That’s a pretty good disagreement, by the way. I’m aware of all this but my context was based on the presumed assumption that the frequency of meteors is increasing long-term. For that to occur there would need to be more meteors everywhere in the inner solar system, not just in the vicinity of Earth. I’m sure you can agree with that.
Most everyone should read ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ at some point in their adult lives. I’m not sure we, as a country, have enough good people left that would be able to continue to ‘control the lightening’.
Actually I stopped in the middle of that book because I found it too depressing. I’ve been meaning to take it up again, however. Notice how the chances went from millions to 1, then to thousands, then to hundreds, and then they stopped reporting the odds altogether. Nevertheless, the odds are still millions to 1 of a real occurance within our lifetimes.
It IS a depressing book. But the ending isn’t all that bad considering how it could have turned out. The antagonists are not dissimilar than those in ‘One Second After’.
I spent a while trying to figure out how far inland a 1500ft tsunami in the GOM would actually go.
Alright then, I don’t want a spoiler but the hint of a better ending helps. If you want to read a real depressing book that is not fiction, I suggest “The Black Book of Communism”. It’s highly peer-reviewed and riddled with ugly details. I’m forcing myself to read it but I don’t want to.
That pic looks like the recent comet that was visible in the western sky near sunset earlier this month...
I saw this thing! It crossed over Manhattan a bit south of me as I was walking down Broadway in the high nineties. It went from west to east and looked greenish, like a neon green, and then it appeared to burn out and disappear, like a huge shooting star.
It looked like it was only a few blocks south of me. Quite low in the sky. But the article says these things are deceiving.
I stopped in my tracks and said “What the he!! was that!” No one else had noticed it. I told someone later I thought I saw a drone.
I spent a while trying to figure out how far inland a 1500ft tsunami in the GOM would actually go.
It would go up the Colorado river and create *another* sea in the Hill Country... but probably also splash North past Waco.
A problem that no doubt bugs them
Yeah, that was kind of a depressing though. Guess Jackson, MS would be kind of damp.
By the way there’s supposed to be a comet late this year, brighter than the moon for what they say. If it survives that is, since it’s sun-grazer. Don’t know how many know this yet. Comet Ison.
Looking forward to it...just hope it doesn’t crap out like some others over the past few decades...
Of that I need no reminder. I saw Halley and Kohuteck (sic) with my toy telescope. Hale-Bopp, however...
Pressure the government to repurpose our ICBM arsenal. It’s the only defense we have at present. Then support the Russian initiative that is presently being discussed to make this an international priority.
“That’s a pretty good disagreement, by the way. I’m aware of all this but my context was based on the presumed assumption that the frequency of meteors is increasing long-term.”
The evidence tends to indicate that is a subjective and a false assumption. If by long term you mean the long term experience of the Solar System, then the assumption must be in gross error, because we have obvious evidence that there has been no reoccurrence of the Late Heavy Bombardment in the Solar System. Secondly, the existence of the inner planets of the Solar System make it self-evident that their coming into existence increasingly thinned out the population of matter within their gravitational influences over time. This decrease in the frequency of bombardments overall is corroborated by the ages, sizes, and frequencies of crater formation on the bodies with little or no atmosphere or plate tectonics.
In the case of shorter time periods measured in decades, centuries, millenia, and millions of years, any presently undetermined variations in bombardment frequencies can be attributed to disruptions of the Oort Cloud by stars passing close by the Solar System, collisions in the Oort Cloud and the Asteroid Belt, and perhaps encounters with interstellar debris fields. In each case, the variations in meteor populations would still be governed by non-uniform distributions resulting from natural forces.
Within the period of human history, there is no evidence that one period of time experienced a greater frequency of bombardment oveerall than another period, but it can be inferred there likely should have been due to encounters with meteor showers as a consequence of coincidence with the orbital paths of comets and asteroids.
In the last hald century, the counts of crater formation on Luna and Mars doees not indicate any significant changes in bombardemnt frequencies.
“For that to occur there would need to be more meteors everywhere in the inner solar system, not just in the vicinity of Earth. I’m sure you can agree with that.”
On the contrary, you are postulating a distribution of the meteors in the inner Solar System which cannot exist in the preseence of the Solar gravitational field, the planetary gravitational fields, the forces of the Solar Wind, and electro-static forces. The planets formed as they did due to the harmonic wave distributions resulting from the gravitational forces, Solar Wind forces, and electro-static forces; see Bode’s Law. There is every reason to expect an interstellar debris field would not have a relativley eveen distribution of meteors in a field the size of the inner Solar System. Even if there did exist such a debris filed and the Solar System encountered it while orbiing the hub of the Milky Way Galaxy, such a debris field would become disrupted and non-uniform in distribution upon encountering the gravitational fields of the Solar System and long before passing through the Oort Cloud on its way into the outer Solar System. The inner Solar System would then encounter the disrupted population of meteors as a series of streams or torrents between quiet periods between those streams and torrents. Again, the debris filed could not enter the inner solar system as an intact field of meteors. You simply cannot have “more meteors everywhere in the inner solar system” because the various mentioned forces remove them from some regions of sapce eveen before they can arrive in the inner Solar System. Any new debris field created within the inner Solar System by something like a collision between asteroids will immediately begin to dissipate into a non-uniform pattern due to the differences in the forces acting upon them.
"This cycle of doom has relevance to the present-day impact hazard, as the Solar System passed through the Galaxy's central plane in the last few million years, and by some accounts a barrage of comets recently dislodged from the Oort Cloud should be approaching the planets now. "
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc020298.html
What is old has become new again, at least with respect to the authors of those articles. The concept that the mass extinctions are due to periodic passages of the Solar System through the galactic plane has been around for more than a half century. I’ve been a proponent of the idea for that long. Science is beginning to catch up with the speculation in the last couple of decades, but they still have a way to go with the presentation of empirical evidence to support our earlier speculations.
In addition to the evidence of iridium, other tracers are coming into use such as fullerenes or Bucky Balls, extraterrestrial osmium, and other novel approaches. There is a probable mega impact site likely buried under the Antarctic icecap for one example to be proven.
Another speculation used in science fiction and now gaining more interest in science is the likeliehood of the existencee of rogue planets in interstellar space between the stars. These are planets who do not orbit a star or orbit a brown dwarf and or each other in the vast spaces between the visible stars. It is already known that stars have come close enough to the Soalr System in past ages to gravitaionally disturb the Oort Cloud, but intersteellar rogue planets remain undiscovered and speculative for the present time. Their existence near the Oort Cloud would certainly greatly increase the opportunities for destrablizing the orbits of objects in the Oort Cloud. So, it would appear we have barely scratched the surfacee of some very real possibilities for objects that could be responsible for raining destruction upon the inner Solar Systeem upon occasion.
The ICBM forces are incapable of performing the mission of asteroid defense.
I saw it! I was driving home in south-eastern PA. Suddenly there was a quick flash, and I watched it as it flared for about three seconds then went out. At first I thought it was a jet on fire, then realized it was going way too fast. I then thought I’d never seen a meteor that size and gunned the engine to get to a valley, because that was going to be like a nuclear blast if it hit land.
Some of the geological papers have suggested the tsunami from the Dinosaur killer made it as far upstream in the Mississippi River Valley as Southern Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri or higher. Along the gulf Coast it supposedly went inland into the lower halves of the states.
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