Browsing: Meteor

When asteroids hit the Earth, they leave behind spectacular geological landmarks.

I was lucky enough this weekend to be away from the city and at an altitude of about 1800m, deep in the mountain side. The rare, clean atmosphere allowed for an uncanny view of the night sky, at least for an urbanite as myself, filled with the most distinguishable stellar bodies I’ve ever been granted […]

In a relevant display of  NASA’s fireball-observing network capabilities, a set of automatic robotic cameras caught a man-sized meteor as it blasted though Earth’s atmosphere causing a fireball spectacle. The event took place on May 20, when the 6-foot-wide (1.8-meter) space rock entered the atmosphere at about 66 miles (106 kilometers) above the city of […]

A recently analyzed 4.5 billion years old meteorite yields one of the oldest minerals known in our solar system: krotite. The mineral is not actually new, in that it was thought to be only a man-made constituent of some high-temperature concrete, according to study researcher Anthony Kampf, curator of Mineral Sciences at the Natural History […]

Last year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s low-res, grayscale Context camera cought a patch of new dark spots on the martian surface which weren’t there just two years before. Further, detailed investigations soon followed as MRO’s more sharp-eyed HiRISE camera went in for a closer look – its capable of spotting even beach ball sized objects […]

The strangest meteor shower one can observe every year is almost upon us. Geminids is the only meteor shower that isn’t caused by a passing comet, but rather by an asteroid; the meteors are slow moving and pretty bright, making them a perfect target not only for astronomy afficionados, but for everybody who want’s to […]

A very small asteroid exploded over the continent of Africa this week, confirming the prediction of astronomers. Despite the fact that nobody has seen and photographed the asteroid due to the fact that it entered in a very remote area, it was detected with an infrasound array in Kenya; it exploded without striking the Earth. […]

After the “crash site” in Peru, meteorites keep the headlines again! This time, scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen found the biggest meteorite to ever crash in the British islands. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of […]

Astronomers from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario have spotted (with the aid of cameras, of course) a meteor falling to Earth; this is quite a rare occasion and scientists from many fields are eagerly awaiting the recovery of the meteorite and the start of the studies. They spotted a giant fireball Wednesday […]