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MAGNOLIA, N.J. (WPVI) -- In the small town of Magnolia, New Jersey, there's a lot of talk about a giant boom heard early Wednesday morning. Around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, residents were woken up by the sound. When Sebastian Leonardo arrived at his auto body shop on Atlantic Avenue later that morning, he noticed a giant hole in the ceiling. When employees climbed up to look at the damage to the roof and ceiling, they saw where the unidentified object had made impact. "A sizable dent in a thick steel gage box. That's when I went to all of my cameras...

According to the West Valley City Police Department, callers from West Valley City, Taylorsville and even Murray reported hearing the loud boom just before 3 a.m. Wednesday. Outdoor home surveillance camera footage from one residence also showed a flash of light. Officers responded in the area of some reports and couldn’t locate any odd activity or objects that could have fallen. Then, the reports kept coming. “If we get like a shots fired call then, you know, we’ll get several calls within a neighborhood or maybe a quarter mile,” Merritt said. “But to get calls that are coming in miles...

The impact was captured using a door camera. Image credit: Compass Media/Joe Velaidum For possibly the first time ever, a meteorite has been captured on video and audio as it struck the Earth, just outside one man's home. Joe Velaidum, of Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada, was standing outside his home last July, before setting off for a walk with his dog. If he had lingered a little longer, he may have become the second person in history to have been confirmed to be hit by a meteorite. "It is surreal to think about just rare and how close this...

As 2024 comes to a close, so does the final celestial show for skywatchers of the year: the Ursid meteor shower. The Ursids will be most active between Dec. 21 and 22, peaking on the 22nd. This makes it a perfect focus for nighttime winter solstice skywatching in the Northern Hemisphere. The shower is expected to produce up to around ten meteors per hour that will be visible at most dark locations. Marc Dantonio, an astronomer and founder of Sky Tour Live Stream Observatories, told The Debrief that although the Ursids’ forthcoming appearance won’t technically peak on the solstice, they...

Explanation: It was a night of 100,000 meteors. The Great Meteor Storm of 1833 was perhaps the most impressive meteor event in recent history. Best visible over eastern North America during the pre-dawn hours of November 13, many people -- including a young Abraham Lincoln -- were woken up to see the sky erupt in streaks and flashes. Hundreds of thousands of meteors blazed across the sky, seemingly pouring out of the constellation of the Lion (Leo). The featured image is a digitization of a wood engraving which itself was based on a painting from a first-person account. We know...

A bright green fireball illuminated the night sky over Montana, U.S., at approximately 05:45 UTC on May 21, 2024 (23:45 LT, May 20). The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 65 reports from users in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, U.S., as well as in Alberta, Canada. This event follows an exceptionally bright meteor over Spain and Portugal on May 18. The meteor was described as unreal, massive, and a once-in-a-lifetime event. “That’s crazy! Mad props to the person that was able to get this footage,” one eyewitness wrote on X.

Scientists have calculated the rotational speed of asteroid 2024 BX1, which exploded over Berlin earlier this year, by letting it trail in images of the sky. It turns out, 2024 BX1 was spinning faster than any other near-Earth object ever seen...The space rock, dubbed 2024 BX1, turned into a fireball and exploded over Berlin in the early hours of Jan. 21. Although small asteroids on collision courses with Earth are typically detected only when they crash into the atmosphere, scientists spotted this one roughly three hours before impact.That's not the only way 2024 BX1 was unusual, according to a paper...

A team of European researchers says that hundreds of thousands of meteorites, which may provide valuable information about the dawn of life on Earth, are disappearing from Antarctica at an alarming rate. Based on their research, the scientists behind the alarming findings say that as many as three-quarters of the approximately 300,000-800,000 meteorites resting on the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet could be lost by 2050. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the research says the culprit behind the wholesale disappearance is the steady rise in global temperature. “For every tenth of a degree of increase in global...

Explanation: A cosmic dust grain plowing through the upper atmosphere much faster than a falling leaf created this brilliant meteor streak. In a serendipitous moment, the sublime night sky view was captured from the resort island of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, on the evening of February 8. Looking across the bay, the camera faces northeast toward the lights of Naples and surrounding cities. Pointing toward the horizon, the meteor streak by chance ends above the silhouette of Mount Vesuvius. One of planet Earth's most famous volcanos, an eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii in 79...

NEO 2003 SD220 on screen. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How can humans protect the Earth from "devastating asteroid and comet impacts?" According to the National Academies and their 2023-2032 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey, ground based astronomical radar systems will have a "unique role" to play in planetary defense. There is currently only one system in the world concentrating on these efforts, NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar, part of the Deep Space Network (DSN). However, a new instrument concept from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) called the next generation RADAR (ngRADAR) system will use the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope...

The eighth-ever prediction of an asteroid impact has delivered some bounty! The discoverer with the little meteorite in hand. Image Credit: Cevin Dettlaff Earlier this week, for only the eighth time ever, an asteroid that actually came with a rare 95-minute warning exploded in the sky over Germany and the hunt began for any potential pieces of meteorite that survived burning up in the atmosphere and fell to Earth. Now, researchers think they have found them. Fragments of asteroid 2024 BX1 about the size of a walnut have been recovered by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and colleagues,...

Oct. 26 (UPI) -- An Arkansas family who awoke to the smell of fire discovered a smoking hole in their deck -- and they suspect a meteorite may have been to blame. John Devane of Greenwood said he and his family awoke to the smell of smoke inside their house about 3 a.m. and set about searching for the source. They discovered the smoke was coming from a hole in their deck, which had apparently caught fire. Devane said the flames had been extinguished when a corner of the family's hot tub melted from the heat, causing it to pour...

Scientists are reporting that a “horned” comet three times bigger than Mount Everest is hurtling toward Earth after encountering a large explosion. The blast originated on October 5 from 12P/Pons-Brooks a cryovolcanic — or cold volcano — comet. According to Live Science, the comet, nicknamed the “Devil” due to its apparent horns, measures a colossal 18.6 miles in diameter, or the size of a small city. For reference, Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, is about 5.5 miles high. This marked the second time this interstellar ice cube erupted in the last four months. The Science Times reports that...

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival. That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago...

(Central Michigan University/YouTube) One of the largest meteorites ever recorded in Michigan never came to the attention of experts until a whopping 80+ years after its discovery. Living a humble life as a 10-kilogram (22-pound) doorstop at a local farm, the space rock laid around for several decades before being recognized by the scientific community. "I could tell right away that this was something special," Mona Sirbescu, a geologist at Central Michigan University (CMU), explained in 2018 after investigating the object. "It's the most valuable specimen I have ever held in my life, monetarily and scientifically." VIDEO AT LINK........... David...

The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best shooting star displays of the year and it's currently active. The Perseid meteor shower (also known as the Perseids) is active every year from mid-July to late August. This year the shower will peak around the night of Aug. 12 and before dawn on Aug.13, 2023, according to the science site Royal Museums Greenwich. 2023 will be a good year for the Perseids as the moon will only be 10% illuminated. The Perseids are caused by Earth passing through debris — bits of ice and rock — left behind by Comet...

Explanation: Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured here is a fireball, a disintegrating meteor that was not only one of the brightest the photographer has ever seen, but colorful. The meteor was captured by chance in mid-July with a camera set up on Hochkar Mountain in Austria to photograph the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. The radiant grit, likely cast off by a comet or asteroid long ago, had the misfortune to enter Earth's atmosphere. Colors in meteors usually originate from ionized chemical elements released as the...

Tiny spheres of once-molten metal magnetically dredged from the seafloor could be pieces from IM1, a potential interstellar meteor that struck Earth in 2014 Over the past two weeks, I have circumnavigated the globe by land, air and sea. The reason? A kitchen sink–sized chunk of interstellar material that my colleagues and I believe collided with the Earth at 100,000 miles per hour nearly a decade ago. After years of effort, we may have finally found pieces of this elusive object on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about a mile beneath the waves. The story began In April 2019,...

VIDEO AT LINK............... June 7 (UPI) -- A British Columbia man said he is trying to determine whether an object that splashed down in his backyard pool was a meteorite. Justin Broad said he was outside his home in Delta earlier this week when something fell from above and splashed into his pool. He said the object, which he suspects may have been a meteorite, was slightly disintegrating in the water. "It didn't cloud up and dissipate. It just dropped to the shallow end right at the bottom in a ball," Broad told Global News. Broad and his wife drained...

Earth has a new moon - or at least a 'quasi-moon', a new study has revealed. A quasi-moon is a space rock that circles the Earth, but is gravitationally bound by the sun. This quasi-moon, called 2023 FW13, was discovered by experts using the Pan-STARRS telescope at the top of the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, and is one of a handful of known quasi-moons. Experts think the ancient cosmic companion has been in Earth's vicinity since 100 BC and will keep circling our planet for at least another 1,500 years, until AD 3700. Thankfully, neither 2023 FW13 or a similar...