Dual Dove
Nowadays, we hear more and more about a potential huge asteroid that would impact our planet sooner or later. However, the danger is not as severe as many expect. But that doesn’t mean that small space rock, like a meteor, won’t cause panic when it explodes in the Earth’s atmosphere. This weekend, a fireball over Edmonton, Canada, lighted up the night skies, troubling the residents of the city.
“I happened to be standing beside one of the telescopes, right under the sky, talking to a couple of visitors, and this interloper came firing across the southeastern sky and left its mark. It got a huge reaction from the people who were there, myself included,” stated Bruce McCurdy, an amateur astronomer, for a blog.
While McCurdy was talking with visitors at the Telus World of Science’s RASC Observatory, where he was volunteering, a bright flash interrupted the meeting. That was the meteor that lighted up the Edmonton night skies on Saturday.
Fireball Over Edmonton Lighted Up The Night Skies
“In the shock of the moment, I tried to get an accurate sense of the details. The direction, how fast it was going, how bright it was, what color it was, the fragmentation that we saw near the end,” added McCurdy.
According to the speculations made by Chris Herd from the University of Alberta, the meteor that lighted up Edmonton night skies was about one meter long. Thanks to the few videos of the fireball over Edmonton, captured by some security cameras across the city, the researchers can establish the right nature of the meteor.
“The fireball, in my opinion, was bright enough that there’s a non-zero chance it produced meteorites. And a non-zero chance of meteorites means a 100 percent chance of followup. The hope is that if there was a fall, it didn’t come down somewhere like a lake, that it actually came down somewhere you can pursue it,” said McCurdy.
Below, there is a news report on the fireball over Edmonton, via Weather/Events YouTube channel:
