Tag archives for meteor
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The top 10 stories on our radar today: Scientists discover that a moth has the best hearing in the animal kingdom, geologists study the mystery behind Earth’s ‘eternal flames,’ and…
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The spectacular meteor explosion above Russia‘s Ural Mountains this morning was caused by a likely truck-size rock weighing in at about nine tons. (Related pictures: “Meteorite Hits Russia.”) It hit the atmosphere at an estimated 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) per hour, and at that high velocity—many times the speed of sound—tremendous air pressure caused the…
Posted by Friday’s meteor strike over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia allowed dashboard cams and people with hand-held cameras to capture some fascinating moments. Here are some of the best ones. The above video captures the sounds of glass breaking and car alarms set off by the meteor’s shock wave. (News Article: Meteorite Fragments Injure a Thousand…
Posted by Shockwaves from a meteor caused damage to buildings in central Russia, hurting at least a thousand people on Friday, according to news reports. More than 200 children were among those injured in the Chelyabinsk region, Russia’s Interior Ministry told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. “Verified information indicates that this was one meteorite which burned…
This Friday asteroid 2012 DA14 will go down in the record books as the closest approach of an object of its size since astronomers began keeping records a few decades ago. Zipping past our planet closer than most orbiting communication and weather satellites, this office building sized chunk of rock should be visible to some…
Posted by Often in science, things get presented as facts, rules, and definitive statements. But part of the joy of science is that “facts” can be in flux, and rules are made to be broken. The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks each year in December, is one such rule-breaker. Unlike every other known meteor shower, the Geminids…
Beyond Neptune‘s orbit, roughly five billion miles from the sun, the solar system can seem like a dark, desolate place. But like the murky depths of the ocean, the darkness hides millions of mysterious bodies—or at least, so we think. Known collectively as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, the first of this population to be discovered…
A philosopher and an astronomer in Utah may have found evidence that the Chinese were *not* the first to spot the comet that would become known as 1P/Halley. Instead, they say, that honor goes to the Greeks, who recorded a comet in the sky when a wagon-full of meteor slammed into the northern Hellespont region…
When it comes to sky shows, sometimes a lunar blessing can be a meteor’s curse. Friday night’s biggest, baddest full moon is sure to capture the hearts of many a skywatcher. But it also means this year’s Geminid meteor shower, due to peak the night of December 13-14, will be largely washed out by the…
