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LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. - The family of a 7-year-old boy says their son was hurt after small meteorites fell from the sky while he was playing outside. Steven Lippard was in his driveway Saturday in Palm Beach County when he began bleeding. The family initially thought he may have been hit by a golf ball or a bird, but then found several small rocks nearby. The rocks were taken to Florida Atlantic University. Initial tests showed the rocks were metallic and could have come from space. Experts are now doing more tests to confirm the possibility. Meteorite strikes around the world...

Strange Space Object Stumps Astronomers; Appears to be Asteroid but Has Six Comet-Like Tails Posted by Russell Westerholm Astronomers have spotted a curious comet-like spatial object with the Hubble Telescope that has six trails, causing it to look like a badminton shuttlecock, BBC News reported. The observers were lead to believe the object is an asteroid because it was spotted in an asteroid belt, but its tails are more characteristic of a comet. Asteroids also typically only appear as tiny dots of light. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," Dave Jewitt, a professor from the University of California...

The fragment is so large that divers have been unable to lift it. Instead, it's been dragged along the bottom of the lake on a metal sheet. At 1,257 pounds--that's 570 kilos--It will be almost as big as the Holsinger meteorite, which landed in Arizona 50,000 years ago, and broke the scales when it was weighed earlier today. The rock will be tested to verify that it is from space and not from somewhere more mundane.

The brilliant streak seen on Friday night in the skies over central Ohio was a piece of an asteroid or comet that was 2 to 3 feet across and hit the atmosphere at 113,000 mph, a NASA official said yesterday. The bright flash of light at 11:33 p.m. prompted some people to call Columbus police to ask what it was while officers chatted about the event over their radios. “The initial trajectory suggests it passed over Columbus, Ohio, moving slightly north of west,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office told The Dispatch in an email. Cooke said there were...

Look for the 2013 Perseid meteor shower to be at its prolific best from late late August 11 until dawn August 12! Great times to watch: after midnight and before dawn on August 11, 12 or 13. We give the nod to Monday, August 12 – in the hours between midnight and dawn. But any of these mornings should be fine for watching this year’s Perseid shower. At dusk and early evening on August 11, the waxing crescent moon shines between the planet Venus and the star Spica. The planet Saturn is found above Spica. The Perseids are a summertime...

August 5, 2013 – SIBERIA - Having an official task to draw up a geological map of the region, a young geologist ended up running into something so unique, outstanding and mysterious that it would still puzzle scientists more than six decades later – the Patomskiy Crater. A host of theories have been put forward in the intervening years: that the crater was created by an ancient civilization, or by prisoners at a top secret Stalin labor camp, or by volcanic activity, or by a meteorite, or by an underground hydrogen explosion, or by a UFO. And even more...

It's well known that the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago when a meteor hit what is now southern Mexico but evidence is accumulating that the biggest extinction of all, 252.3m years ago, at the end of the Permian period, was also triggered by an impact that changed the climate. While the idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while, what's been missing is a suitable crater to confirm it. Associate Professor Eric Tohver of the University of Western Australia's School of Earth and Environment believes he has found the impact crater...

May 17, 2013: For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. "Lunar meteor showers" have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. They've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program. "On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've...

A LARGE meteor was spotted in the sky above Cornwall in the early hours of this morning. A giant green meteor was spotted by astronomers in the skies above Cornwall Experts have said the phenomenon was likely to have been debris from Halley's Comet. The large lump of space rock was seen by people across England and Wales and Twitter was abuzz with reports of sightings. A meteor spotter with the handle @VirtualAstronomer, wrote "The meteor fireball was witnessed from Cornwall to the Scottish [sic] borders." A man Tweeting from Nottingham, @TwitFlickR, described it as a "green fireball that lasted...

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...

Network of stations with seismometers and air pressure sensors detected the blast waves A network of seismographic stations recorded spectacular signals from the blast waves of the meteor that landed near Chelyabinsk, Russia, as the waves crossed the United States. The National Science Foundation- (NSF) supported stations are used to study earthquakes and the Earth's deep interior. While thousands of earthquakes around the globe are recorded by seismometers in these stations--part of the permanent Global Seismographic Network (GSN) and EarthScope's temporary Transportable Array (TA)--signals from large meteor impacts are far less common. The meteor explosion near Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15,...

A Super Fast Comet Is Headed For Mars The EconomistMarch 5, 2013Shutterstock A PAIR of middle-aged tourists (see previous post) are not the only thing headed for Mars. Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is also on its way. Discovered on January 3rd, some calculations of its orbit, according to Phil Plait, the rather good “Bad Astronomer”, have it passing 37,000km above the surface of the planet in October 2014—roughly the height at which communication satellites orbit Earth, and a remarkably close shave by cosmic standards. An official NASA website puts the most likely “close-approach” distance between the comet and Mars...

Trajectory apparently began in near-Earth asteroid group ApolloAstroboffins have figured out where the Chelaybinsk meteorite came from using the power of maths and videos shot by witnesses in Russia.Click here for VideoJorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin of the University of Antioquia in Colombia have come up with a preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the meteor, which smashed into the city in the Urals completely unexpectedly two weeks ago. By combing through the witness videos and using trigonometry, the astronomers have determined that the meteorite came from the Apollo class of asteroids in our Solar System's space rock belt. The...

Poring over crowd-sourced footage, researchers Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, were able to use "simple trigonometry to calculate the height, speed, and position of the rock as it fell to Earth," says BBC News. More importantly, the duo was able to find out where Russia's most famous meteor was likely born. Using astronomy software developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory, Zuluaga and Ferrin gathered enough data to trace the meteoroid's origins in outer space. The information included the meteor's relative angle to the horizon, the shadows it cast, and video timestamps of...

Explanation: A meteoroid fell to Earth on February 15, streaking some 20 to 30 kilometers above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia at 9:20am local time. Initially traveling at about 20 kilometers per second, its explosive deceleration after impact with the lower atmosphere created a flash brighter than the Sun. This picture of the brilliant bolide (and others of its persistent trail) was captured by photographer Marat Ametvaleev, surprised during his morning sunrise session creating panoramic images of the nearby frosty landscape. An estimated 500 kilotons of energy was released by the explosion of the 17 meter wide space rock with...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A streak of light that apparently sparked several reports across Southern California was not considered to be a public threat, according to fire officials. Over 40 reports from eyewitnesses around the Southland and statewide reported the sight to the American Meteor Society (AMS) around approximately 10:30 p.m. on Thursday night. Residents from cities as far north as Sacramento, Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara and as far south as Malibu and Costa Mesa reported a “brief tail of light” – described as everything from blue to white to bright green in color – traveling in a east-southeast...

A Russian policeman works near an ice hole, said by the Interior Ministry department for Chelyabinsk region to be the point of impact of a meteor seen earlier in the Urals region, at lake Chebarkul some 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Chelyabinsk February 15, 2013 (Reuters / Chelyabinsk region Interior Ministry) Russian scientists investigating the meteorite explosion in the Urals explained the nature of the event that caused havoc in the region. NASA said the shockwave force was equal to a 500-kiloton explosion – 30 times the Hiroshima blast.­The object was identified as a solitary 10-ton bolide by...

At a news conference Friday, NASA scientists said the object that exploded over Russia was a “tiny asteroid” that measured roughly 45 feet across, weighed about 10,000 tons and traveled about 40,000 mph. The object vaporized roughly 15 miles above the surface of the Earth, causing a shock wave that triggered the global network of listening devices that was established to detect nuclear test explosions. The force of the explosion measured between 300 and 500 kilotons, equivalent to a modern nuclear bomb, according to Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,...

Jodi Hernandez reports on the cosmic close encounter that the earth is experiencing tonight and the real one Russia experienced this morning. On a day that had a lot of people talking about meteorites and asteroids, a fireball of some sort was seen streaking across the Bay Area skies. The fireball was seen around 7:45 p.m. There are reports into the newsroom from people as far north as Fairfield and as far south as Gilroy. It was also seen in Sacramento, Newark, Walnut Creek, and St. Helena. It was bluish in color and appeared to be heading straight to the...

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