Latest news with #bolide
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Geologists uncover new evidence from ancient asteroid that hit the Chesapeake Bay
An illustration of the bolide impact in the Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago. (Illustration by Nicolle Rager-Fuller /U.S. National Science Foundation) By Katherine Hafner/WHRO About 35 million years ago, Hampton Roads was underwater, with the coastline dozens of miles west toward Richmond. Dinosaurs were long gone, but the ocean teemed with marine creatures such as ancient whales, sharks and sea stars. That is until one unfortunate day, when life across what's now southeastern Virginia was obliterated within seconds. A bolide – an extraterrestrial object such as an asteroid or comet – hurtled out of space and landed in the lower part of the Chesapeake Bay. 'There was a kill zone that would have been several hundred miles out in every direction,' said Rich Whittecar, a geologist and emeritus professor at Old Dominion University. The volcanic-like lateral blast from the impact ripped through faster than the speed of sound, with exponentially more explosive power than atomic bombs detonated by humans, Whittecar said. Plants and animals would be 'totally shredded' by all the material – and simultaneously incinerated by the intense heat. 'Not a good day,' Whittecar said. Geologists first pieced together the story of the Chesapeake Bay impact crater in the 1990s. It's the largest known bolide strike in the U.S. and among the largest in the world. But new research is the first to document the far-reaching impacts of the collision. Scientists say they uncovered a site 240 miles away in the Sandhills of North Carolina showing traces of a massive tsunami caused by the Virginia asteroid. And the discovery all started by chance. Almost a decade ago, retired consulting geologist Bob Ganis was investigating some fossils in Moore County, N.C. when he got a call from a local property owner nearby. A pipeline was set to be constructed through the edge of her property called Paint Hill Farm, and she wondered if Ganis might like to come investigate the temporary trench as part of his research. Ganis accepted the offer and it became 'one of the most strange days of my life,' he said. He took a look at the rock layers exposed about 10 feet deep and was 'totally baffled.' What he saw didn't align with his geological understanding of the region. 'I had no idea what it was, and no reports of this kind of geology were available to understand what it was,' he said. Thus began a yearslong quest to get to the bottom of the mystery trapped in sediment. The first piece of the puzzle was determining the age of the rock layers in question. Ganis said he found fossilized shark teeth nearby and worked with peers who helped date them to the late Eocene era, which lasted from about 56 to 34 million years ago. Next Ganis connected with Ralph Willoughby with the South Carolina Geological Survey, and described the mysterious sediment layers. They methodically went through the rock beds to try and explain each within the geological context of the region. 'When we get to the top, this explanation of all this rubble at the top, we're still scratching our heads,' Ganis said. ''What is this stuff?'' One day, looking at photos from the trench site, 'a light bulb goes off,' he said. 'It struck us (that) this is a tsunami deposit.' There was no geological history to explain why such a deposit would be there, except for one: the meteoroid strike up in Virginia on that fateful day 35 million years ago. The asteroid, moving at about 44,000 miles per hour, was about 2 to 3 miles wide and blasted an enormous crater into the continental shelf of modern day Virginia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Much of the crater is still underwater in the bay, which is why it took until recent decades for scientists to discover. The circular outline of the impact in Hampton Roads includes the bottom half of the Eastern Shore, northern edge of Norfolk and eastern outskirts of the Peninsula and Middle Peninsula. Like any object that lands in water, the asteroid caused a big splash – a giant tsunami likely thousands of feet high, 'the kind of tsunami that the world rarely sees,' Ganis said. It likely washed over the Blue Ridge Mountains and swept across the Southeast – maybe even over the Atlantic Ocean to lap at the shores of Africa and Europe, he said. Scientists described such a wide-reaching tsunami when they first investigated the Chesapeake Bay impact crater but no one had found actual remains of it. Ganis' team homed in on the tsunami as a likely explanation for the Paint Hill rock formation, but needed more evidence to prove it. The bottom layer featured charcoal, natural glass and other rock fragments; materials you would expect to fly out of the impact, Ganis said. It also had the hallmarks of a 'tremendously hot blast.' Another layer contained ash from the explosion. Whittecar, the ODU geologist, came in to help figure out the top layer, a sandy conglomeration including petrified wood and what looked like a substance called plinthite. The team needed an expert to confirm. 'I went down (to) look at this stuff and basically said, 'Yep, that's plinthite,'' Whittecar said. The material is an iron-rich, clumpy reddish clay common in tropical regions. Researchers believe the Virginia tsunami swept up this material from the seabed and ended up at Paint Hill. The presence of iridium in the sediment helped nail down the team's tsunami theory. It is an extremely rare metal on Earth but common in asteroids. The researchers published their collaborative findings in the peer-reviewed journal Southeastern Geology last month. Paint Hill's owner recently sold the 300-acre property to the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, which plans to turn it over to the state park system to expand the Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve. The tsunami deposits will be preserved and may become a 'highlight of the park' through related exhibits and educational activities, Ganis said. Whittecar said geologists are interested in this type of work largely out of curiosity and advancing knowledge for future generations. 'From the practical hazard prevention side of things,' he said, 'of course it does give a little weight to the notion that if we can stop one of these (asteroids) from hitting, it is worth getting out there and nudging that thing out of the way.' This story was originally published by the Mercury's media partner WHRO Public Media, the Hampton Roads region's largest media company. 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Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Why the daytime fireball meteor that blasted over Atlanta was a rare sight
Not to freak anyone out, but objects from space are crashing into the Earth's atmosphere all the time. They just don't always happen with the perfect timing of the June 26 meteor that blasted across the Atlanta area and was seen across the Southeast during the middle of the day. "It's very hard for us to see daytime meteors," Georgia Tech planetary scientist Masatoshi Hirabayashi told FOX Weather. "The reason is the sun is the first objection … Location is critical. Many are actually occurring, not only on the continent, but also in the ocean." With more than 70% of the Earth covered in water, many meteors fall over the ocean. "This time it happened in Georgia, so people you know found that event, so could you record it," Hirabayashi said. "The timing is very important." Hirabayashi is currently part of three ongoing spaceflight missions to study asteroids, including NASA's Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids. The fireball was spotted from Virginia to Georgia around noon with more than 200 reports submitted to the American Meteor Society (AMS) website. The AMS said the daytime meteor was a bolide. A fireball is a very bright meteor – brighter than magnitude 4 – roughly equivalent to the brilliance of Venus in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a specific type of fireball that culminates in a spectacular explosion of light, often accompanied by visible fragments. Hirabayashi said the videos captured across the Southeast show this two-part explosion typical of a bolide. "It exploded and it fragmented into multiple pieces or numerous pieces and eventually falling onto the ground as meteorites," he said. Could Nasa's Dart Mission Result In The First Human-created Meteor Shower? Pieces of the suspected meteor damaged a home in Henry County, Georgia, southeast of Atlanta, putting a hole in the roof and ceiling. While tiny objects crash into our planet all the time, understanding these smaller asteroids is important for planetary defense. If a sample of the meteor in Georgia is collected, it provides more information about the millions of objects in our solar system. "By looking at meteorites, we can understand where they come from," he said. First Celestial Images From 10-Year Project Photographing The Universe Released In 2013, a larger fireball event in Chelyabinsk, Russia propagated shockwaves shattering thousands of windows and injuring people. That meteor was also small, believed to be about 20 meters. According to Hirabayashi, these smaller asteroids, under 100 meters, are hard to track. "The issue is what's going to happen in terms of impact events. We pretty much know (about) those larger than 100 meters. But when it comes to smaller than that, we do not have enough data," Hirabayashi said. "We have to assess how we would be able to mitigate if that would happen or if it is about to happen." The scientific community just got a leg-up from the new National Science Foundation's Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which found more than 2,000 previously unknown asteroids in our solar system over 10 hours of article source: Why the daytime fireball meteor that blasted over Atlanta was a rare sight
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Fireball sightings in GA Thursday spark questions. What is NASA, meteorologists calling it?
A fiery streak across Georgia's sky left thousands across metro Atlanta and beyond stunned on Thursday. According to 11Alive news in Atlanta, "Rockdale County relayed reports of people hearing a 'loud sound like a boom' and houses shaking." According to the National Weather Service's office in Charleston, the streak was detected between 12:51 p.m. to 12:56 p.m. The NWS also received reports about a "satellite-based lightning detection shows a streak within cloud free sky over the NC/VA border, over Gasbury, VA." Here's what we know about this fireball. According to 11Alive, scientists are calling it a bolide. NASA defines this as a really bright meteor that can be seen over a very wide area. NASA confirmed that it was traveling at a speed of 30,000 miles per hour, first spotted about 48 miles above Oxford, GA. The meteor, a three-foot-wide asteroidal fragment weighing over a ton, disintegrated 27 miles above West Forest, GA. This caused a mid-air release of energy equivalent to 20 tons of TNT. According to social media posts and news outlets, a piece of this fireball, a rock, had crashed through someone's roof, according to Henry County Emergency Management. Here are more posts and sightings of the fireball in the sky. Vanessa Countryman is the Trending Topics Reporter for the the Deep South Connect Team Georgia. Email her at Vcountryman@ This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: What was the fireball in Georgia on Thursday? What meteorologists say
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Watch a brilliant 'fireball' meteor explode over China on May 28 (video)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Residents of Maoming, China were treated to a celestial light show earlier this week when a surprise fireball burst to life overhead, illuminating the city before disappearing in an intense flare of light. The fireball burned up over the southern Chinese province of Guangdong at 9:33 p.m. local time on May 28, according to multiple dashcam videos that have circulated online in the wake of the event. The videos show the meteor make a dramatic 5-second journey through the night sky, during which it changed color from a pale green-blue hue to an intense burst of orange-yellow light. This particular fireball may have been a bolide - a special meteor that breaks apart with a dramatic flash of light. A fireball is the name given when a relatively large meteor - over 1 millimeter in diameter - collides with Earth's atmosphere, triggering a fleeting flare of light that can outshine the planets themselves in the night sky. The color of a burning meteor is determined by a number of factors such as its speed, composition and how it compresses the air in its path, according to the American Meteor Society. Bright, reddish flashes of light can arise when fast-moving meteors strike the atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, compressing the air in front of them. This process causes them to glow brightly in the night sky and has the potential to force atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen atoms trapped in the meteor's path to release an abundance of reddish light, according to NASA. Meteors with a high sodium content also have a tendency to burn with an orange-yellow light. No major meteor showers were active on the night in question, so it's likely that the Maoming City fireball was born of a 'sporadic meteor' - a random piece of space debris left over from the creation of the solar system that happened to collide with Earth on May 28. Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@
News.com.au
12-05-2025
- Science
- News.com.au
Witnesses stunned as ‘fireball' meteor lights up Perth skies
Residents in Western Australia have been stunned by a 'fireball' meteor that lit up the skies. The bright fireball passed through the skies about 6am on Sunday over the Central Wheatbelt, producing a brilliant yellow flash and a trail of bright green. Witnesses were able to catch a glimpse of the early-morning meteor from Perth to the Goldfields, however, experts are yet to determine where it eventually landed. The Perth Observatory said the astronomical sight was 'most likely an iron meteor' which had been 'orbiting within the inner Solar System'. 'To shine that brightly, the fireball — technically known as a bolide — would have been about the size of a cricket ball to a basketball,' the observatory said online. According to Perth Observatory's Matthew Woods, the meteor would have been travelling between 16 to 60km per second, leaving behind a trail of green as the built-up friction melted. He told 9News it was 'one hell of a meteor'. 'That was very nice … little surprise for Mother's Day,' he said. Online, witnesses were dumbfounded by the 'spectacular' sight, with some believing it was an aeroplane. 'Never seen anything like it,' one person wrote. 'Thought someone was driving at us with high beams on at first,' said another, who watched it pass overhead from Newdegate. A resident from Mt Magnet said they initially thought the 'huge and burning bright orange-red' light was 'the moon until it moved'. Some thought the meteor was the Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft that plunged back to earth more than 50 years after its failed launch to Venus. However, Curtin University astrophysicist Steven Tingay told the ABC it was unlikely the fallen spacecraft, which likely landed over the Indian Ocean on Saturday, though European and US agencies are yet to confirm its exact location.
