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In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century. To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a...

A surprise meteor shower spotted in February was likely caused by cosmic "bread crumbs" dropped by an undiscovered comet that could potentially pose a threat to Earth, astronomers announced today (July 27). The tiny meteoroids that streaked through Earth's atmosphere for a few hours on Feb. 4 represent a previously unknown meteor shower, researchers said. The "shooting stars" arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, so the shower is called the February Eta Draconids, or FEDs for short. The bits of debris appear to have been shed by a long-period comet. Long-period comets whiz by the sun very...

In a presentation earlier this month, a team of researchers from The Geological Society of America (GSA)identified nine of what they believe to be the most livable caves on the surface of Mars — spaces large enough that they could give future explorers much-needed protection from the harsh environment of the planet's surface, The New York Times reports. The Red Planet is a hostile place: temperatures can drop to below negative 148 degrees Fahrenheit, the atmosphere is incredibly thin, and there's no ozone layer, which means solar radiation is extreme as well. And that's not to mention the very real...

A newly discovered, "potentially hazardous" asteroid almost the size of the world's tallest skyscraper is set to tumble past Earth just in time for Halloween, according to NASA. The asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) — just under the height of Dubai's 2,716-foot-tall (828 m) Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will zoom past our planet at around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound. At its closest approach on Nov. 1, the asteroid will come within about 1.43 million...

Bring a warm blanket, lie back and watch the remains of Halley's Comet burn up in our atmosphere. The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight tonight (Oct. 21), making this an excellent time to get outside and see some fireballs streak through the atmosphere. The viewing conditions for this year's Orionid meteor shower are favorable, as the moon will be in a waning crescent phase and will be only 17% illuminated. The Orionids are considered to be one of the most reliable meteor showers after the Geminids and Perseids, and are known to produce dozens of meteors per hour, making this...

PLYMOUTH, Mass. -- A piece of debris came crashing through the roof of a building in Plymouth. Investigators are not sure where the piece of debris came from or what it came from. However, they do know it came from far up because the force of the object falling tore a hole through the roof of a building. Luckily, the object fell into an empty room and no one was hurt. Andrew McWilliams, an employee at Michael’s Warehouse, was shocked when he opened a door in his office to see the debris on the floor. “And that was the first...

The space agency estimates there are about 25,000 asteroids of at least 140m in diameter near Earth's orbit. While the odds of them crashing into our planet at any given time are minuscule, Congress directed Nasa to find 90 per cent of them by 2020. Scientists have found fewer than half. But for reasons it has not publicly explained, the administration has proposed delaying by two years, until 2028, the launch of an infrared space telescope meant to find those threatening asteroids and sharply cutting its budget for next year. About 500 times a year, researchers identify asteroids of at...

Explanation: Does the Earth ever pass through a wind of meteors? Yes, and they are frequently visible as meteor showers. Almost all meteors are sand-sized debris that escaped from a Sun-orbiting comet or asteroid, debris that continues in an elongated orbit around the Sun. Circling the same Sun, our Earth can move through an orbiting debris stream, where it can appear, over time, as a meteor wind. The meteors that light up in Earth's atmosphere, however, are usually destroyed. Their streaks, though, can all be traced back to a single point on the sky called the radiant. The featured image...

In a new study, researchers analyzed some of the tiny fragments of space rock that were left behind after the meteor exploded, known as meteorite dust. Normally, meteors produce a small amount of dust as they burn up, but the tiny grains are lost to scientists because they are either too small to find, scattered by the wind, fall into water or are contaminated by the environment. However, after the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded, a massive plume of dust hung in the atmosphere for more than four days before eventually raining down on Earth's surface, according to NASA. And luckily, layers...

A Compilation of Chelyabinsk Meteor Footage from February 15, 2013February 14, 2015 | David Snodgress

A bright fireball was seen over the southwestern United Kingdom at 20:46 UTC on May 16, 2022. The event comes just five days after a very bright fireball was seen over the same region. Interestingly, both events had very similar trajectories. The American Meteor Society (AMS) and International Meteor Organization (IMO) together with UKMON (UK), Werkgroep Meteoren (NL), and Vigie-Ciel (FR) received more than 800 reports, mainly from England and Wales.2 The ground trajectory computed from the witness reports shows that the meteor was traveling from SW to NE and ended its visible flight over southern England.

Meteorites are not ‘flaming rocks of doom,' NASA says The “bright fireball” was traveling at 35,000 mph when it exploded at 8:03 a.m. with the “energy equivalent of 3 tons of TNT,” according to NASA Meteor Watch, the agency's project that tracks fireball activity. “Existing law states that any meteorites belong to the owner of the property on which they fell; out of respect for the privacy of those in the area, we will not disclose the locations of these finds,” And finding anything of value is likely harder than you think. “The pieces from this object were way too...

Loud fireball spotted over southern Mississippi mostly heard, hardly seen. A fiery meteor streaked across the morning skies in southern Mississippi yesterday, April 27, 2022. More than 30 eyewitnesses in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi reported seeing a bright fireball at 8:03 a.m. CDT. The sighting was soon followed by numerous reports of loud booms heard in Claiborne County, Mississippi, and surrounding counties. Approximately 22,000 miles out in space, NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLM) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 16 and 17 detected several bright flashes associated with the fragmentation of this bolide, or exceptionally bright...

Rob Waugh Rob Waugh·Contributor Tue, 19 April 2022, 7:56 am·2-min read The fireball streaked above Shropshire last week (Gareth Oakey, UK Meteor Network) The fireball streaked above Shropshire last week. (Gareth Oakey, UK Meteor Network) A huge fireball that streaked across the sky last week may have left a meteorite somewhere in Shropshire, scientists believe. Dr Luke Daly, of UKFAll and the University of Glasgow, said: "We think about 500g of meteorite survived to the ground in approximately four fragments just south of Shrewsbury. "Given the amount of wheat and oilseed rape in the area, we have been literally looking...

A small meteor that hit Earth in 2014 was from another star system, and may have left interstellar debris on the seafloor. An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor—and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system—which was...

A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo(opens in new tab) released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC). The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv. 2019...

This is the instant an unexpected meteorite smashed into a city in India, vaporising on impact and leaving a 20ft crater. Luckily, the space rock did not hit any residential areas and instead impacted in a factory compound in an industrial part of the city, "I was urinating... I saw a bright light I was scared I ran away midway," confessed one witness. “My city is in now plot for sci-fi movie,” joked another viewer on social media.

A fireball over San Francisco Bay Area on 17 Oct 2012. (NASA/Robert P. Moreno Jr) On 11 March 2022, at around 9:20 pm UTC, a small asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere. This is not unusual. Space rocks enter Earth's atmosphere all the time. What makes this asteroid so amazing is that an astronomer spotted it before it made its rendezvous with atmospheric entry. It's named 2022 EB5, and it's only the fifth asteroid we've ever managed to spot prior to impact. The object, thought to measure around two meters across (6.5 ft), was spotted by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky of Konkoly Observatory's...

Getting to bottom of crater mystery 06/22/2003By ALEXANDRA WITZE / The Dallas Morning News ODESSA – It took two hours for Vance Holliday to travel back thousands of years. For a time machine, he drilled into the dirt of the meteor crater just west of Odessa. The deeper he went, the closer Dr. Holliday got to his goal – discovering the crater's age. When the Odessa meteorite hit, some tens of thousands of years ago, it would have been a fearsome sight. An iron rock nearly 50 feet across fell screaming from the sky, hitting with energy roughly equivalent to...

60m-year-old meteor crater mapped in North Sea Scientists have mapped a small but well-preserved crater in the North Sea formed by a meteorite they believe smacked into Earth 60 to 65 million years ago. The impact crater measures about six miles wide and sits beneath 120 feet of seawater and more than 900 feet of sediment. Researchers believe the so-called Silverpit crater was formed after the catastrophic impact near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula that scientists suspect contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. "We know so little about how impact structures are created when meteorites and comets hit," said University of...