Syracuse, NY – A million years ago, a 1-ton rock escaped from the planetary belt between Mars and Jupiter, bound for Syracuse.
The rock and the earth, both stretched in separate orbits by the sun, dose each other for millennia.
Just after noon on Wednesday, when the meteorite crashed into Earth’s atmosphere over central New York, shattering windows, dismantling earthquake detectors, and scattering ancient debris as it burned half the heat in that temperature like the sun.
Robert Lansford, firebury report coordinator of the American Meteorological Society, said, “It is possible. “The chances of a collision are endless, but if you do it millions of times, it eventually happens.”
Thousands of meteors hit Earth every year, but most of the planets are too small to see because they are oceans or desolate land and most people do not pay attention to them. This week was a rarity of rare events: a meteor large and bright to see during daylight would strike the sky over a densely populated area that millions of people could experience.
“Anyone who saw it should remember it forever, because it’s not something most people will ever witness,” said Zoe Lerner Pontario, manager of Cornell University’s Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility. “If you draw a 1-kilometer square in your yard, you’ll only get meteors to hit that space once in 50,000 years.”
Thanks to one of the country’s cloudy atmospheres, unfortunately, most Central New Yorkers did not witness the meteor. But it was captured on video in western New York and Toronto, and people from Virginia to Nantario heard gunshots that sounded to some like gunshots or falling trees. One of the 181 observers who reported to the meteorite community said: “I scared the bugs.”
Based on those reports, the Society calculated that the meteorite struck the atmosphere above Lake Nantario and escaped just south of Rochester. NASA’s projected route shows a different path, with the meteor striking over Syracuse and 3 seconds with diving southwest towards Finger Lakes before the Flinges. At that time it was only 22 miles high, which is a long way for meteors to enter the atmosphere.
NASA has three meteor-tracking cameras in Osao and Western Pennsylvania that would have given a definite route, but they were off at the time.
“Meteor cameras don’t turn on at night because they are very sensitive to the sun,” explained Bill Cook, who tracked meteors for NASA.
The meteorite was so bright that it was captured by a NASA satellite that monitors lightning. Fragments of debris scattered after the meteorite explosion could possibly be seen on the National Weather Service radar. And a sonic boom was detected by a seismograph in Ontario, an instrument that records earthquakes.
When the meteorite eventually warmed up enough to explode, Cook said, it released 66 tons of dynamite energy.
“When it crashed, it caused a jolt that triggered a sonic boom that people heard.”
NASA estimated that the meteor was just 3 feet below and weighed about 1,800 pounds. The meteors are as big as they go: the shooting stars seen in the annual meteor shower are no bigger than small pebbles or golf balls.
Wednesday’s meteor broke through the atmosphere at 56,000 miles.
“Really, it’s slow for meteors,” Cook said. “Some, like the Leonids, go over 150,000 miles.”
The relatively slow motion suggests that the meteorite may have escaped from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, about 92 million miles from Earth. It is as far away from the earth as the sun.
As the meteorite advanced into Earth’s increasingly dense atmosphere, it reached a temperature of about 5,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison, the surface of the sun is slightly less than 10,000 degrees.
Cook said the rock – technically called a meteorite before it hit the Earth’s atmosphere and became a meteorite – was the color of pencil lead. As the fireball explodes, it will emit 100 times more light than the full moon.
The meteorite was so large that some pieces could remain intact and rain down on Earth, Lunsford said.
“It is possible that some small pieces landed somewhere between Rochester and Syracuse.”
The pieces that fall to Earth are probably no bigger than charcoal briquettes, called meteors. They are black and look burnt, because that’s what they are.
“They were just like lava,” Lansford said. “It’s very alien to the ordinary rocks you find.”
They can be valuable alien meteorites, and the cottage industry of meteorite-hunters preys on them. Lansford said the fragments are probably scattered over an area about 25 miles in diameter at the end of the meteor path. NASA’s rough estimates show that the meteorite route ends at the northern top of Lake Kyuga, while the meteorite community is about 60 miles west.
It is several thousand square miles of potential debris field. Lerner Ponterio, whose museum houses a collection of meteors at Cornell, said meteor hunters should not live up to their expectations.
“Finding a piece on the ground is a very rare occurrence, and almost always when someone thinks they’ve got it, it’s something else.”
Meteors strike the Earth every day, Kutk said, and large fireballs like Wednesday hit the U.S. once a month. Happens somewhere in, Cook said. But this week, it was somewhere Our Somewhere
“They’re not unusual,” Cook said. “But if you look at it, it’s a rare occurrence.”
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