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Meteorites are not ‘flaming rocks of doom,' NASA says The “bright fireball” was traveling at 35,000 mph when it exploded at 8:03 a.m. with the “energy equivalent of 3 tons of TNT,” according to NASA Meteor Watch, the agency's project that tracks fireball activity. “Existing law states that any meteorites belong to the owner of the property on which they fell; out of respect for the privacy of those in the area, we will not disclose the locations of these finds,” And finding anything of value is likely harder than you think. “The pieces from this object were way too...

Loud fireball spotted over southern Mississippi mostly heard, hardly seen. A fiery meteor streaked across the morning skies in southern Mississippi yesterday, April 27, 2022. More than 30 eyewitnesses in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi reported seeing a bright fireball at 8:03 a.m. CDT. The sighting was soon followed by numerous reports of loud booms heard in Claiborne County, Mississippi, and surrounding counties. Approximately 22,000 miles out in space, NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLM) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 16 and 17 detected several bright flashes associated with the fragmentation of this bolide, or exceptionally bright...

Rob Waugh Rob Waugh·Contributor Tue, 19 April 2022, 7:56 am·2-min read The fireball streaked above Shropshire last week (Gareth Oakey, UK Meteor Network) The fireball streaked above Shropshire last week. (Gareth Oakey, UK Meteor Network) A huge fireball that streaked across the sky last week may have left a meteorite somewhere in Shropshire, scientists believe. Dr Luke Daly, of UKFAll and the University of Glasgow, said: "We think about 500g of meteorite survived to the ground in approximately four fragments just south of Shrewsbury. "Given the amount of wheat and oilseed rape in the area, we have been literally looking...

This is the instant an unexpected meteorite smashed into a city in India, vaporising on impact and leaving a 20ft crater. Luckily, the space rock did not hit any residential areas and instead impacted in a factory compound in an industrial part of the city, "I was urinating... I saw a bright light I was scared I ran away midway," confessed one witness. “My city is in now plot for sci-fi movie,” joked another viewer on social media.

Christie's auction house confirmed to Fox News that it is hosting an auction that includes a dog house from Costa Rica that was struck by a meteorite on April 23, 2019. The occupant of the house, a German Shepard named Roky, wasn't injured during the incident, although the dog was understandably startled by event. James Hyslop, head of Science and Natural History for Christie's, said, "This is a really exciting auction and opportunity for collectors. Meteorites are incredibly rare objects; the combined weight of all the known meteorites is less than the annual output of gold. Ever since an exhibition...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...

(Museums Victoria) In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century. To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However,...

A woman in Canada awoke in shock earlier this week when a rock crashed through the ceiling of her home and landed on her bed, narrowly missing her but spraying grit and other debris on her face, as her dog barked frantically. “I was in shock and I just sat here for a few hours shaking,” she said. “The odds of that happening are so small so I’m pretty grateful to be alive.”

Ruth Hamilton of Golden, British Columbia woke up to the sound of a crash and dust on her face the night of October 4. Onlookers had enjoyed a meteor sighting earlier that night above Lake Louise, about 52 mi east. Hamilton, who was unharmed, saw a rock on her pillow right next to where her head usually lies. She called 911, and she and an officer made calls to confirm that it wasn't debris from nearby construction at the Kicking Horse Canyon. 'We called the Canyon project to see if they were doing any blasting and they weren't, but they...

A week-long exercise held by Nasa this week has concluded that a catastrophic event with an asteroid would be unavoidable, even given six months to prepare.The hypothetical impact scenario, which took place during a planetary defense conference hosted by the United Nations, confirmed that there is no current technology on earth that could stop an Asteroid if we knew in advance it was projected to hit the earth. "If confronted with the scenario in real life, we would not be able to launch any spacecraft on such short notice with current capabilities," the participants said.The only response to such an...

An ancient, meteorite, or achondrite, was discovered in the Sahara desert last year that has now been identified as chunk from a protoplanet that formed before Earth came into existence. The space rock, named EC 002, dates back 4.6 billion years and consists mostly of volcanic rock, leading experts to believe it came from the crust of a very early planet.... ...no asteroid shares the spectral features of EC 002, indicating that almost all of these bodies have disappeared, either because they went on to form the building blocks of larger bodies or planets or were simply destroyed.'

A surveillance video captured by a Nest security camera in Rochester submitted by a local user shows a short, bright streak of light in the sky. The submitter said the fireball was accompanied by a loud boom, and an emailer from Strafford told News 9 his house shook after the fireball was seen. Just one of the reports submitted to the AMS indicated that the witnesses heard any sound. Fireballs are meteors that are unusually bright, at least as bright as Venus. They can create a sonic boom that is heard a few minutes after the fireball is seen. It's...

Huge Fireball Burns over the London Sky, Creates Shock Wave

The hunt is on for meteorite fragments that are likely to have fallen to Earth over England on Sunday night. Many people across Northern Europe saw a fireball in the sky shortly before 22:00 GMT, and the streak of light was also caught on special cameras. Scientists think some pieces will have survived the intense heat of atmospheric entry and hit the ground. A computer model that analysed the camera data suggests the probable site of impact is just north of Cheltenham. The fireball produced a sonic boom as it hurtled across the southern England sky. Eyewitness accounts describe the...

Earth’s atmosphere sees several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude each day, so they are quite common. We are just typically unable to see them due to daylight and because a vast majority occur over oceans and uninhabited regions. However, the brighter the fireball, the more rare it is. Do fireballs make a sound? Sounds like sociology’s favorite question of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?” But the answer is quite interesting. According to the American Meteor Society, fireballs can make a sound—two in fact. Both generated...

The oldest solid material on Earth has just been identified, and it predates the Solar System itself by at least a few hundred million years. The teensy tiny microscopic grains of dust were forged in a distant star somewhere between 5 and 7 billion years ago, according to new research. By comparison, our Sun is just 4.6 billion years old. Eventually, these grains were carried to Earth in a meteorite. "This is one of the most exciting studies I've worked on," said cosmochemist Philipp Heck of the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago. "These are the...

Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer's phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn't figure out "why everyone was so alarmed." "I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming," Duffy, who is also lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week. Then he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK....

Villagers and farmers pose around the crater of a suspected meteorite that crashed in a field at Mahadeva village in the Indian eastern state of Bihar.

Researchers tracked down the impact site of an ancient meteorite by studying the alignment patterns of ancient debris sprayed in all directions by the violent collision. Photo by University of Oxford ================================================================ June 10 (UPI) -- Researchers have located the epicenter of an ancient meteorite impact along the Scottish coast, the largest impact in the British Isles. Scientists first identified evidence of the impact in 2008, but they were unable to pin down the exact location of the crater. Over the last decade, researchers conducted field studies and analyzed rock samples in the lab. Their findings allowed them to identify...