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DENVER -- Dozens of Denver's 7News viewers called the newsroom Thursday evening to report a giant fireball seen streaking across the Colorado night sky. Many of the callers all said the fireball looked as thought it crashed into the earth somewhere on the Front Range. It was spectacular," said Keith Cabaniss of Longmont. "I was sitting on the porch and saw it come from the east headed west to southwest. I was at the right place at the right time." A research scientist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science confirmed that the fireball seen by many people was...

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." —The Bhagavad Gita Seven years after the nuclear tests in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was lecturing at a college when a student asked if there were any U.S. atomic tests before Alamogordo. “Yes, in modern times,” he replied. The sentence, enigmatic and incomprehensible at the time, was actually an allusion to ancient Hindu texts that describe an apocalyptic catastrophe that doesn’t correlate with volcanic eruptions or other known phenomena. Oppenheimer, who avidly studied ancient Sanskrit, was undoubtedly referring to a passage in...

The Orionid meteor shower is expected to put on a good show tonight into the predawn hours Wednesday, weather permitting. This annual meteor shower is created when Earth passes through trails of comet debris left in space long ago by Halley's Comet. The "shooting stars" develop when bits typically no larger than a pea , and mostly sand-grain-sized, vaporize in Earth's upper atmosphere. "Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour," said Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. People in cities and suburbs will see far fewer meteors, because all but the...

I have information that supports my hypothesis that many of our human illnesses may have their origins in space. Case in point is the meteor and crater discovered in Peru. Many of the local people came down with a mysterious illness following exposure to the space debris and or crater. The W.H.O. investigated the incident after learning of a strange illness (w/out ANY protection LOL) . It is possible they have not identified the nature of the illness nor has there been any mention of it in medical journals but I suspect that if it is H1N1 they are keeping...

The annual Perseid meteor shower is expected to put on a good show this week for those willing to get up in the wee hours of the morning and wait patiently for the shooting stars. In North America, the best time to watch will be between midnight to 5 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 12, but late Tuesday night and also Wednesday night could prove fruitful, weather permitting. The Perseids are always reliable, and sometimes rather spectacular. The only things that puts a damper on the August show are bad weather or bright moonlight. Unfortunately this week, as the Perseids reach...

<p>Skygazers are getting ready to watch the annual Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on Wednesday.</p> <p>The Perseid shower occurs when the Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle.</p> <p>As this cometary "grit" strikes our atmosphere, it burns up, often creating streaks of light across the sky.</p>

Did anybody watch that horrible horrible miniseries called Meteor? Never in my life watching B rated made for TV movies have I seen one so bad. The entire script must have been two pages and to make it stretch into a 4 hour movie they just redid those two pages over and over and over again. Let's not forget the total ignorance of the laws of physics or the fact that they blew a 30 mile round meteor out of the sky when it was just out of our atmosphere. And then a second meteor had entered our atmosphere and...

A bright and fast object seemingly "overtook" the International Space Station May 29, according to several witnesses observing from two different states, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness database. The first case was reported from Texas, where a man and two other witnesses were out watching the International Space Station fly over, and then observed this second object - moving at between two and-a-half and three times the speed of the space station. A second group is reporting in from the RMCC Observatory, Mounds, Oklahoma, who say they saw the same event.

Second Loud Boom Rattles Windows In NY May Have Been Meteorite (3/9/2009) There's been another loud "boom." This time it rattled windows in parts of Rockland County. Nanuet resident Keith Wallenstein said the mysterious noise woke him up at about 5:15 Monday morning and sounded like someone had flown an F-16 over his house. An earlier loud "boom" heard in Westchester County early Saturday might have been a meteorite. Police and The Journal News got a flurry of reports from people in Scarsdale, Mount Vernon, Yonkers, Tuckahoe, Eastchester and Bronxville. Weather officials say there was no thunder in the area...

The Federal Aviation Administration says a piece of hot metal that crashed through the roof of a Jersey City business did not come from an airplane. FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac says investigators examined the metal and determined it is made of cast iron, which is not used in airplanes. She says it's up to local authorities to determine where the object came from. Owner Al Smith was fork-lifting a sofa onto a wooden storage platform around 10 a.m. at his moving company when he heard a sound he thought was a bomb. A piece of warm metal the size of...

FIREBALL MANIA: Runners in Sunday's Austin marathon were astonished when a brilliant fireball raced across the Texas sky in broad daylight. The extremely-bright meteor descended at 11 am CST on Feb. 15th less than a day after the FAA reportedly warned U.S. pilots to watch for "falling space debris" from the recent satellite collision between Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251. Click on the image to launch a News 8 Austin video: What you just saw was not satellite debris. The high speed of the fireball in the News 8 video is typical of a natural meteoroid hitting Earth's atmosphere at...

University of Oregon Scientists found microscopic diamonds in the black layer of rock at Murray Springs in Arizona. At least once in Earth’s history, global warming ended quickly, and scientists have long wondered why. Now researchers are reporting that the abrupt cooling — which took place about 12,900 years ago, just as the planet was emerging from an ice age — may have been caused by one or more meteors that slammed into North America. That could explain the extinction of mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and maybe even the first human inhabitants of the Americas, the scientists report in Friday’s...

Did anyone else, aroung 21:29 EST seea HUGE shooting star,heading from the East, going East to South East in the sky in the New England Sky???

Anyone else see it? Went below tree line west of Saratoga NY - Might have gone to ground toward Utica??

Scientists are today searching for remnants of a meteor that brilliantly lit up the sky in western Canada before breaking into pieces. Alan Hildebrand, a University of Calgary planetary scientist, called it one of the largest meteors visible in the country in the last decade. Video images showed what appeared to be a speeding fireball over Saskatoon which became larger and brighter before disappearing as it neared the ground. Mr Hildebrand said that he received about 300 e-mail reports from witnesses to the event. “It would be something like a billion-watt light bulb,” said Mr Hildebrand, who also co-ordinates meteor...

amazing video

From Edmonton to Edgeley, Sask., and points in between, people reported that the brilliant fireball streaking across western Canadian skies on Thursday seemed mighty close. Hundreds flooded phone lines at police stations and media outlets with accounts of a multicoloured meteor. No meteorite fragments have been found yet, but some of the witnesses who said they saw something fall are likely right, said Dr. Christopher Herd, a University of Alberta earth and atmospheric sciences professor. Herd was getting reports of the meteor touching down in all parts of Alberta. "It's a massive fireball; it's one of the brightest that we've...

The Taurid meteors, sometimes called the "Halloween fireballs," show up between mid-October and mid-November, but Nov. 5 to 12 will likely be the best time to look for them this year, taking into account both their peak of activity and the effect of increasingly bright moonlight on viewing conditions. After the Moon sets – around 11 p.m. local time on Nov. 5, later on subsequent nights – some 10 to 15 meteors may appear per hour. They are often yellowish-orange and, as meteors go, appear to move rather slowly. Their name comes from the way they seem to radiate from...

Almighty smash left record crater on Mars 25 June 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. David Shiga A giant impact explains why Mars's two hemispheres are so different (Illustration: Jeff Andrews-Hanna) Five minutes after Mars was hit by an asteroid travelling at 40 times the speed of sound, pieces of the planet's crust (orange blobs) are flung into space, while a shock wave propagates into the planet's molten core (yellow) (Illustration: Francis Nimmo) A suspected crater in the planet's northern hemisphere forms a kidney shape (blue region at left), but when researchers studied the variations in the strength of gravity...

PARIS (AFP) - Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a study to be published Sunday. European and US scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial. Previous studies had suggested that the space rocks, which hit Earth some 40 years ago, might have been contaminated upon impact. Both of the molecules identified, uracil and xanthine, "are present in our DNA and RNA," said lead...

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time. The tablet is now known to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact at Köfels, Austria and is published in a new book, 'A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event.' The giant landslide centred at Köfels in Austria is 500m thick and five kilometres in diameter and has long been a mystery since geologists first looked at it in the 19th century. The conclusion drawn by research in the middle 20th century was that it must be...

How The Peruvian Meteorite Made It To EarthThe Carancas Fireball. Planetary geologists had thought that stony meteorites would be destroyed when they passed through Earth's atmosphere. This one struck ground near Carancas, Peru, at about 15,000 miles per hour. Brown University geologists have advanced a new theory that would upend current thinking about stony meteorites. (Credit: Peter Schultz, Brown University) ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2008) — It made news around the world: On Sept. 15, 2007, an object hurtled through the sky and crashed into the Peruvian countryside. Scientists dispatched to the site near the village of Carancas found a gaping...

Astronomers Capture Rare Video Of Meteor Falling To Earth; Hunt For Meteorite ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2008) — Astronomers from The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, have captured rare video of a meteor falling to Earth. The Physics and Astronomy Department at Western has a network of all-sky cameras in Southern Ontario that scan the sky monitoring for meteors. Associate Professor Peter Brown, who specializes in the study of meteors and meteorites, says that Wednesday evening (March 5) at 10:59 p.m. EST these cameras captured video of a large fireball and the department has also received a number of...

SPOKANE, Wash. — An apparent meteor streaked through the sky over the Pacific Northwest early Tuesday, drawing reports of bright lights and sonic booms in parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Although a witness reported seeing the object strike the Earth in a remote part of Adams County, in southeast Washington, it had not been found. "I'm convinced it was a meteor," said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. "It was a classic description of a fireball." Chester speculated the meteor was the size of a big suitcase and had been orbiting the sun for...

Well water of the tiny Canadian town of Gypsumville, Manitoba (population 65) has been poisoned by an extraterrestrial. The invader: A meteorite which struck down almost a quarter-billion years ago, creating the 25-mile-wide (40-kilometer) Lake Martin impact crater. The ancient impact shattered the granitic ground so that extraordinary amounts of fluoride now taint the well water. Slightly higher than recommended amounts of fluoride can cause mottled teeth, while even higher concentrations can lead to neurological problems and softened bones. This is could be the first time a meteor impact has been tied to a modern health threat, say the geologists...

Meteors' mysterious origin traced to 1490 event 15:50 07 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby Last week's Quadrantid meteor shower was probably debris from a deep-space explosion that went off in the late 15th century, new observations reveal. The meteors, which return every January, were observed more closely than ever before when a group of 14 astronomers tracked them for nine hours on a flight from California, US, to the North Pole. They found that the shower peaked at around 0200 GMT on Friday, matching a prediction made by Peter Jenniskens of NASA. He based his prediction on the...

Airborne astronomers to track intense meteor shower 16:59 03 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby The most intense meteor shower of the year hits Earth tonight. If the skies are clear and you live at high northern latitudes, then you could see dozens of Quadrantid meteors streaking over the pole. Or you might spot a plane full of astronomers racing northward, trying to find out how this unusual meteor shower was created, and whether it is the shrapnel of a celestial explosion witnessed in the 15th century. Like other meteor showers, the Quadrantids appear when Earth moves through an...

Friday, November 16, 2007 According to predictions, the famous Leonid meteor shower will peak this weekend. The best viewing is predicted to be during the wee hours before dawn on Sunday, when you might see as many as 10 to 15 meteors per hour. But meteor showers are notorious for defying predictions, so don’t discount Saturday and Monday mornings. And don’t be too surprised if the Leonids surpass or fall shy of the predictions. Even though the first quarter moon will light the evening sky, moonlight shouldn’t bother this year’s Leonid meteor display. As a general rule, the fast-flying Leonid...

Volcanic Eruptions, Not Meteor, May Have Killed The DinosaursRajahmundry Quarry. Keller's crucial link between the eruption and the mass extinction comes in the form of microscopic marine fossils that are known to have evolved immediately after the mysterious mass extinction event. The same telltale fossilized planktonic foraminifera were found at Rajahmundry near the Bay of Bengal, about 1000 kilometers from the center of the Deccan Traps near Mumbai. (Credit: Photo courtesy Gerta Keller) ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2007) — A series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, not a meteor impact in...

A flaming object over Minnesota skies this afternoon may have been a meteor. Shortly after 2 p.m., people across the Twin Cities reported seeing a "metallic" object or "flaming ball" falling from the sky. Broadcasters and emergency dispatchers got hundreds of calls from people who saw the object traveling from the northeast to the southwest. The FAA received no reports of anything falling from any airplanes in the area, leading to speculation that it was a meteor that burned up in the atmosphere, since no crash site has been identified. Residents of Lyon County in far southwestern Minnesota reported a...

A two-topic post. First, you may have heard "Andromeda Strain" type reports of a meteor impact in Peru that reportedly caused illness in 300 people or so. The reports were unclear; some doubted there even was a meteor at all. Well, there was. The linked article in the header is about it; apparently the meteor (meteorite when it hit, of course) hit where the water table was shallow, causing some steaming. Analysis has confirmed the extraterrestrial origin, and maybe about 30 people were bothered by it. This is a summary of the article; read the whole thing for the more...

An object that struck the high plains of Peru on Saturday, causing a mysterious illness among local residents, was a rare kind of meteorite, scientists announced today. A team of Peruvian researchers confirmed the origins of the object, which crashed near Lake Titicaca, after taking samples to a lab in the capital city of Lima (see Peru map). Nearby residents who visited the impact crater complained of headaches and nausea, spurring speculation that the explosion was a subterranean geyser eruption or a release of noxious gas from decayed matter underground. But the illness was the result of inhaling arsenic fumes,...

TOMS RIVER (1010 WINS) -- A fiery streak across the sky got the attention of the Coast Guard Saturday night, after the reported fireball crashed into the waters off the Jersey Shore. Concerned calls started coming in from South Carolina to Long Island about 9 p.m. Coast Guard boats were searching near the site of the reported impact, off Normandy Beach in Toms River, about 10 miles off shore. No debris has been found in the water. The Toms River Fire Department says it also got some calls and there were at least 20 people on the beach with the...

The meteors that are about to rain down in the early morning of September 1 date from around 4 A.D., the latest calculations show. It is not often that we can tell when a shooting star was first released from a comet into space, to travel as a meteoroid in an orbit around the Sun, and finally collide with Earth's atmosphere to shine as a meteor for our enjoyment. Most meteors that sporadically flash across the sky on a dark moonless night date from anonymous times. Only in recent years have we learned to trace young meteor showers, just a...

LOS ANGELES – Summer's annual meteor shower promises to put on a dazzling show when it peaks this weekend – provided you're far from city lights. With no moon in sight to interfere with the Perseid meteor shower, skygazers can expect to spot streaking fireballs late Sunday into dawn Monday regardless of time zone. Astronomers estimate as many as 60 meteors per hour could flit across the sky at the shower's peak. This year's sky show comes with an added bonus: Mars will be visible as a bright red dot in the northeastern sky. “We have front-row seats this year,”...

Rare meteor shower to shed light on dangerous comets 17:07 08 August 2007 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby A rare meteor shower predicted to hit Earth on 1 September should give astronomers only their second chance to study an ancient comet's crust. It could also help them develop a warning system against an otherwise insidious threat – a comet aimed at Earth from the dark fringes of the solar system. September's shower, called the alpha Aurigids, has only been seen three times before, in 1935, 1986 and 1994. The reason for this elusiveness is the shower's unusual origin. Most meteor...

Bits of Halley's Comet will streak into the Earth's atmosphere before dawn on Sunday during the peak of the eta Aquarid meteor shower. Although moonlight will make all but the brightest meteors impossible to see, those that are visible may be quite spectacular due to the geometry of the shower. Halley's Comet last swung by the Earth in 1986 and now lies in the outer solar system. But every time it passes near the Sun on its 76-year orbit, the nucleus of the icy object sheds about 6 metres of material, which spreads out along the comet's orbit. Twice a...

Sorry for the shameless vanity, but I was just outside in the back yard in Northern Georgia, and an incredibly bright light illuminated the dark yard like an arc lamp. I looked up and saw a meteor streaking overhead, white hot, which then broke up into orange, glowing fragments. This happened at 10:21PM EST. I apologize for posting something random like this, but it was astonishing. Perhaps it was a piece of space junk that reentered the atmosphere tonight. Did anyone else see this? It was truly spectacular.

Hollywood got it wrong, this is how you stop an apocalyptic asteroid Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 25/02/2007 Attempts to save mankind by smashing asteroids as they head towards Earth may do more harm than good, scientists believe. Rather than Hollywood's preferred option, engineers are trying to develop unmanned rockets that can land on space rocks and use the asteroids' own material to propel them into a safer orbit. The plan will be detailed at a conference, sponsored by Nasa next month, at which its scientists will reveal their -estimate that 100,000 asteroids orbiting near...

SAN FRANCISCO--The fate of humanity might someday lie with a gravity tractor. A gravity tractor, as envisioned by scientists, is a spacecraft that would hover over an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and, through gravitational attraction, accelerate or slow down the asteroid's rate of travel. By altering the speed, the gravity tractor could prevent the asteroid from striking Earth and wreaking environmental and economic havoc. "It is possible to save the Earth from something like an apocalypse" with this kind of spacecraft, said Edward Lu, an astronaut and a scientist with NASA's Johnson Space Center, during a panel...

Scientists Say NJ Object Is Meteorite Friday January 5, 2007 11:16 PM FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) - A mysterious rocklike object that crashed through the roof of a home and landed in the bathroom was a meteorite, experts said Friday. For now, scientists are calling the dense metallic object ``Freehold Township'' after the place where it fell. It's about the size of a golf ball but weighs about 13 ounces, as much of a can of soup. Magnets held near it are attracted to it. Rutgers University geologists Jeremy Delaney, Gail Ashley and Claire Condie and Peter Elliott, an independent...

Geminid meteors seen striking the Moon 17:13 05 January 2007 NewScientist.com news service Kelly Young Two small NASA telescopes with their lenses trained on the Moon spied five, and possibly six, Geminid meteoroids striking the lunar surface early on the morning of 14 December. The observations will help NASA design safe shelters for its future Moon base. On Earth, most meteors burn up as they crash through the atmosphere. The Moon's atmosphere is negligible, however, so the largest of the space rocks crash into its surface with the force of 8-tonne bombs. "We hope to learn how often big rocks...

It's hard to imagine anything more bone-chilling than lying on the ground in mid-December for several hours at night. But if you're willing to bundle up, the reliable Geminid meteor shower is due to reach its peak late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning. The Geminid event is known for producing one or two meteors every minute during the peak for viewers with dark skies willing to brave chilly nights.

The 2006 Leonid Meteor Shower: A Viewer's Guide November 17, 2006 Joe Rao Mid-November brings us the return of the famous Leonid meteor shower, which has a storied history of producing some of the most sensational meteor displays ever recorded. These meteors travel along the orbit of periodic comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, and whenever that comet is passing through the inner solar system, the Leonids have a chance to provide us with a dramatic show. But the most recent passage of the comet to the Sun came back in 1998. We are now well past the favored time frame when, for several...

Source: Geological Society of America Date: October 24, 2006 Far More Than A Meteor Killed Dinos, Evidence Suggests There's growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period. Cottonmouth Creek waterfall over the event deposit with reworked Chicxulub impact spherules. The original Chicxulub ejecta layer was discovered in a yellow clay layer 45 cm below the base of the event deposit. The yellow clay represents a...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday. Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn, said the fire gutted the cottage and badly burned the man's hands and face in the incident on October 10. "We sought assistance from Bochum observatory and they noted that at that particular moment the earth was near a field of meteoroid splinter and it could be assumed that particles...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A sonic boom rattled southern New Zealand on Tuesday, and hundreds of callers swamped emergency services about the noise, which scientists said was probably caused by a small meteor plunging toward earth. Residents in the southern city of Christchurch, 190 miles south of the capital Wellington, told police and fire services that the boom shook the ground and their houses. The resident superintendent of the Mt. John Observatory, Allan Gilmore, told National Radio the sonic boom indicated the meteor was traveling "very low" and was probably between the size of a baseball and a basketball. Witnesses...

Shanghai builds vast bunker to shield against terrorism attack (Filed: 31/07/2006) The authorities in Shanghai, which is the Chinese financial hub, have built a huge underground shelter against the eventuality of terrorism or industrial accidents. The vast 968,400sq ft subterranean complex could accommodate 200,000 people for up to 15 days.It is linked to government offices, commercial and residential areas and the transport system by a labyrinth of tunnels. The bunker can protect occupants from "nuclear radiation, poisonous gases, explosions and other disasters," the state's news agency Xinhua reported yesterday. "In peacetime, parts of the bunker could be used as garages,...

Does a giant crater lie beneath the Antarctic ice? Signs of an ancient impact could help to explain a mass extinction. Mark Peplow A dense bit of rock in the Antarctic (orange circle) seems to be circled by a crater. © Ohio State University Evidence of a cataclysmic meteorite impact has been unearthed in Antarctica, according to researchers who say the collision could possibly explain the greatest mass extinction ever seen on our planet. But scientists contacted by news@nature.com say they are sceptical, as no signs of such an enormous impact have been found in other, well-studied areas of Antarctica....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A meteor's roaring crash into Antarctica -- larger and earlier than the impact that killed the dinosaurs -- caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists said. Ohio State University scientists said the 483-kilometer-wide (300-mile-wide) crater is now hidden more than 1.6 kilometers (one mile) beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. "Gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out," the university said in a statement Thursday....