Posted on 09/22/2022 5:44:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The bright trail of light captured imaginations all across the United Kingdom.
A bright fireball streaked across the sky late at night on Sept. 14 in the U.K..
At first, some observers thought the whizzing ball of light could have been a piece of space junk, perhaps from one of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. But after some speedy calculations, the U.K. Meteor Network determined that the fireball was caused by a small space rock entering Earth’s atmosphere.
“We’ve analysed it from many more angles. It is definitely a meteor. Probably a small piece of an asteroid that’s broken off an asteroid. It came in at an asteroidal orbit,” John Maclean, an astronomer at the U.K. Meteor Network, told The Guardian. The U.K. Meteor Network is a group of citizen scientists who analyze footage of possible meteors using 172 cameras placed around Britain.
Based on the meteor's angle of entry into Earth’s atmosphere, scientists at the Network suspect that the space rock plummeted at an angle that carried it over Wales, the Irish Sea and Belfast, Ireland. If the object didn’t completely disintegrate in the atmosphere, tiny meteorites may have rained down into the Atlantic Ocean near the Scottish island of Islay.
Steve Owens, an astronomer and Science Operations Manager at the Glasgow Science Centre in Scotland, told BBC News that Wednesday’s fireball was likely caused by a space rock the size of a golf ball.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
In the Middle Ages the “experts” thought farmers were crazy because they said rocks sometimes fall from the sky.
The “experts” said it couldn’t happen, it was just superstitious “little people” who didn’t know better.
Goodness Gracious!
I had asteroids one time.
Yup. That goes back all the way to Aristotle, with his fixed dome of sky. He claimed that meteorites were just stones lifted by the winds and dropped in elsewhere.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ensisheim-meteorite
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