Is the sky falling? No, but Chicken Little could be excused for thinking so. What
has been falling a lot lately though is stars...shooting stars. Meteors to be exact, and in this case we're talking about fireball meteors. Chicken Little is a fellow sky-watcher, and would surely have noticed the uptick in fireballs by now.
Yesterday there were fifty (50) fireballs spotted in a 24-hour period worldwide. That's not a record. The most I've seen is 63 in one day there's probably been more than that. BTW I did want to mention that, if I have this right, about four days ago an asteroid came within about 6,000 miles of Earth.
That's known as a "cosmic close shave." Seriously, that's close. It wasn't even discovered until two days after it flew by. The reason these asteroids can't be seen until they're right up on us, or have gone past, is because they're coming from behind the Sun, and can't be tracked visually or with radar or IR. But back to fireballs.
When I first starting talking to people in the chat on the meteor page on YouTube (livemeteors.com) in 2015, and started learning tons of new things, I learned that Earth was on the outskirts of a huge debris field in space, and that it would be getting much more dense as we went further into it, and that meteor sightings would go up exponentially. That's what's happening now. Since I'm into this stuff I've been talking about it for about five years.
Over the last decade meteor sightings, and especially fireball meteors, have risen fairly steadily, with a sharp spike over the last year or so, just as predicted. Fifty fireballs in one day has been unheard-of in our lifetime. Speak of the Devil, a notification just came up for a live stream about fireballs. I'll be back...
Well, that was mostly talking about the same stuff, but a new article just came in. I'm telling you...the skies are crowded. Recently a meteorite crashed through the roof of a man's home in Indonesia. He dug it out of his garden, still warm. It was a rare type of meteorite, and it sold to a collector in the UK for 1.4-million pounds. I was thinking that was around $2-million US, but it's a bit less. Last time I checked the dollar was still around a buck-fifty a quid, but it's gone down to around $1.32. Huh.
My sources have been saying for years that not only were meteors going to increase but that more of them would start making it to Earth's surface, and here we go. A few have started major forest fires, although those stories aren't publicized. The people with the badass telescopes know what's coming. Next year will be something called the Jupiter Collision, where the first of three clusters of debris in our path will slam into Jupiter. Those clusters will be in our neighborhood by 2024. You have to dig a bit to find this stuff out, but since I'm a sky-guy it's what I do. This information isn't promoted to the public of course because it would cause panic.
Last year there were three comets at once visible from Earth, for the first time in recorded history. It was hoped that two of them might get really bright and put on a show, but they were torn apart by the Sun's gravity and petered out. With comets and asteroids comes more debris, and more meteors. My guys called it years ago. I still run into people who've never seen a shooting star. If you happen to be one of them, just stop and look up on a clear night and wait a bit. Any night in the next several years should be fine.
This is a graphic representation of a meteor that came by about three weeks ago. This shows that it exploded in the atmosphere and released a lot of energy. The center horizontal line represents the meteor. The length of the line represents the duration (how long it was visible) and the extra lines show energy levels.
A typical meteor that lasted less than a second would be indicated by a dot or a very short line, like the red dot and the two blue dots in the center to the right, which actually show the meteor sputtering out. This meteor was intensely-bright for about one second, then very bright for another two seconds and then gave one last little flash and a couple of chirps and then faded out. It's the amount of energy released when it exploded that's the deal. It would've been a good one to see.
This type of meteor isn't uncommon lately, and they've tracked much bigger and longer-duration ones, but still it's impressive, and the numbers on these have gone up. I don't know the exact figures but where a decade ago you might see maybe a dozen a day, nowadays there's a hundred or more. This one would've still been impressive without all the energy released. Lots of them come in every hour that look just like the center line without the extra energy bands. This meteor exploded with a nice boom and put out a decent shockwave.
It wasn't as powerful as the one that exploded over Russia in 2013 (I think), but you wouldn't have wanted to be too close to this one. They say that this is just a warmup, and the real show is yet to come. So far they've been right. Now we have another meteor crashing into a house. Interestingly the only time a meteor has been recorded actually striking someone happened back in the 50s in Sylacauga, where both Jim Nabors and my dad grew up. My grandmother remembered it well. For over half a century she was a local telephone operator and she knew everybody in town. She knew the woman personally and she remembered all the phone chatter after it happened. It's a small world.
A longtime YouTube friend of mine just put up a vid about the famous Leonid meteor shower of 1833 that I always talk about, and I can't resist putting up another woodcut from that event. Most of the images from that event are woodcuts, and they're spectacular.
I especially like this one with snow on the ground. If it were possible to go inside a painting and visit for a while it'd be this one for me. I saw the Leonids in 1975 or possibly '74, and I've never seen another meteor shower anything like it. Still it was nothing like this. Some people freaked-out thinking it was the end of the world, and understandably so. I'm glad the engraver kept a steady hand. A few of my guys say we might see something like this again within the next few years. Stay tuned. This is one of my areas of interest.
I started this post a few days ago and things keep happening. I found out today that on Friday the 13th an asteroid passed within 250 miles of Earth. I had to double-check the thumbnail because I thought I'd read it wrong. It was supposed to pass by at around 48,000 miles, which is still close in cosmic terms, but this is about as close as it gets. It's the closest flyby on record in fact. It's about 40' long, and I'm assuming it's in an orbit that will send it back our way in a few years. I haven't looked into this particular asteroid yet, but if by chance you want to look into it yourself you can find it on spaceweather.com. How the discrepancy in distance happened I haven't heard but it's shocking. Usually with the ones they can track they're right on the money with distance. They've got it down to a science (SCIENCE).
My guys also say that they're trying to keep news like this under wraps, again not to cause panic, and that could possibly explain the difference in 48,000 miles and 250. Maybe they didn't want to come out and say "Hey, y'all...an asteroid as big as a semi is going to pass us at less than the distance from Atlanta to Pensacola, but don't worry about it." BTW I took a guess at two cities that were about 250 miles apart and I guessed these. The actual distance is 283.3 miles as the crow flies, so I was pretty dang close. Anyway news gets out, and plenty of civilians have the equipment to track these things, just like the big boys.
Oddly enough I haven't seen a single meteor this year. If it holds up it'll be the first year since I was about three years old that I haven't seen one. Maybe it's the calm before the storm...who knows? Speaking of storms, one guy says that what's upcoming won't be meteor showers but meteor storms. We'll see I guess. He hasn't been wrong yet. It's getting busy up yonder. Stay tuned, and heads-up.
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