Elaine Meinel Supkis
Wednsday a meteorite was captured by a camera as it flew over Finland. No one saw this coming. It wasn't a huge rock but it was still pretty big. If it hit a city, the devastation would have been pretty bad. Luckily for humans, most meteorites are small or miss us. But not always.
Meteorite landed in least populated part of Findland, near the North Pole.
At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several seconds to travel across the sky.A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.
Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.
"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.
"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.
One of the problems with tracking objects in space is many of them are pretty invisible until they enter our atmosphere. Recently, a comet whizzed by the earth and it is in the last stages of disintigration. There is a lot of this out there and we can't see it until it arrives. With several comets falling apart this last year, it is no surprise to see fragments of interstellar debris dropping on us so unexpectedly.
Here is an earlier story of a similar meteorite hitting northern Finland.
Meteorite suspected of hitting river in northern Finland
NewRoom Finland
December 30, 2005A large explosion crater found in the Mantokoski river in Utsjoki, northern Finland, may be caused by a meteorite, said Juhani Harjunharja, chair of the Ursa astronomical association, in a statement Friday.
The crater has an estimated diameter of as much as 300 meters. Samples are being sent to the University of Oulu for examination. The possibility of the crater being caused by the remnant of a satellite has not been ruled out.
"For my part I am strongly leaning towards the opinion that it is a meteorite", Mr Harjunharja said.
Every year, pieces of the puzzle of our earth's past are found laying right under our feet and one of the more important pieces are the various impact craters. This is something we have to take seriously just like mega-volcano events or tsunami-earthquake disasters. Meteor Crater in Arizona is a stark reminder that even as humans walked this green earth, a very large meteor struck the USA. Such an event today would be most dire!
This is why the space program should get hopping on tracking all these celestial peas being shot at us!
This is the website that discusses the famous mysterious Russian explosion.
The rock that hit this week or last December weren't very big but this latest is the biggest to hit since the Siberian event. If that event was like buckshot, it was still pretty destructive. So far, I haven't seen news of anyone finding the meteorite yet.
"Most asteroid scientists had not expected to find Itokawa to be a rubble pile; its gravity, smaller than that of Earth by five orders of magnitude, was thought too small to hold it together. It is not even clear why Itokawa is there at all, given that you just have to shake it gently at about 10 cm/s (escape velocity) for it to fly apart. But Itokawa hangs on to its pieces. It seems to be nothing but pieces: a sediment-world governed by ballistic mobilization and pulverization, seismic shaking by impact, vibrational size sorting, low strain rate flow of charged granules, complex gravitational dynamics, dust levitation by photoionization, and solar wind winnowing of lofted dust. Weird stuff. Impact craters are resurfaced as quickly as they form, and smooth deep gravel beds ("seas") are found.The infrared (6) and x-ray fluorescence (7) spectroscopy experiments onboard the orbiting spacecraft have determined that Itokawa is probably chondritic in composition. This is in concordance with the NEAR spectroscopic investigation of Eros (8), another S-type asteroid. The density of an ordinary chondrite meteorite is around 3 to 3.5g/cm3. Abe et al. (9) use laser altimetry and spacecraft telemetry to derive the mass of Itokawa (3.5 x 1010 kg), giving a density value (1.9 g/cm3). If chondritic, it must have a porosity around 40%, which is greater than the porosity of sand and about as loose as you can possibly pack a rock pile. Itokawa would have to be extremely loose rubble all the way down (10)."
Cool, huh?
- J.
Kottayam, May 31: The "red rains" in Kerala five years ago was the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study.The study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University here by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student a Santosh Kumar shows that red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin.
The findings published in the international journal 'Astrophysics and Space Science' state that the fragment contained dense collection of red cells.
This was in the BBC, too. I looked at the pictures of what 'fell' and it looked like red blood cells only these didn't have DNA so I have no idea what is going on. Just another mystery and there are so many mysteries to solve. Whenever anyone says there isn't anything left to figure out, well, I doubt that will ever happen. Life forms are of infinite variety and expression.
And no two snowflakes are exactly the same. And the more we look around, the less we know, just the sheer variety of the galaxies that surround us is staggering. And each one is different. Let's hope we are around a long time so we can figure this all out.
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