Fireball lights up the sky above western Canada
Late last week, a big space rock smashed into Earth's atmosphere, where it burst into incandescence and created a visual display few will ever forget.
By
Richard Talcott —
Published:
November 24, 2008 This video frame shows the November 21, 2008, fireball near its beginning. Richard Huziak and Gordon Sarty captured this image using the all-sky camera located on the roof of the physics building at the University of Saskatchewan.
Photo by Gordon Sarty
Check out this CTV news story about the event, "Fire in the sky."
The brief flashes of light typically seen during a meteor shower arise from pieces of interplanetary debris no bigger than a grain of sand. Bright meteors and fireballs — meteors that reach or exceed the approximate brightness of Venus — may be as big as a garden-variety pea. In contrast, the brilliant fireball over western Canada may have been a foot or two in diameter when it entered Earth's atmosphere.
No one yet knows whether any pieces of this meteor survived the fiery passage through Earth's protective blanket of air. Researchers suspect if any fragments reached the ground (where they officially would become meteorites), they likely would be found near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. Once scientists examine the videos and determine the debris' precise path, they can narrow the search zone to a reasonable size.
Richard Huziak and Gordon Sarty are two amateur astronomers that help maintain the all-sky meteor camera on the roof of the University of Saskatchewan physics building. See their video of the event below.
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