Two items of meteorite news…
1) Apparently, a lot of pieces from the Texas fireball have now been recovered. Geology.com has a great written account of a meteorite hunter who, along with a group of other rock hunters, found something like 100 pieces of the falling rock. There are fantastic pictures of the meteorites as well. Hurray!
2) A big bolide was seen over Finland earlier today. A news report claims a rock fell all the way down to the ground, but I don’t think that’s actually confirmed. Also, they say it came in at 15 meters/second, which is slower than highway speeds. I think they meant kilometers/second, but I guess the metric system confuses Europeans sometimes, too. Anyway, it’s snowy there, so it’s unlikely they’ll find any meteorite even if it does exist.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I bet the Texan meteorite hunters will offer the meteorites, commercially, at http://aerolite.org/ any time soon, as it seems to be their web site. Let’s hope some scientists get a hold of some as well.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
“but I guess the metric system confuses Europeans sometimes, too.”
Mr. Phil Plait, call your office! Europe has been using the Système Internationale d’Unités for quite a while, since around 1850 in Europe, and 1880 in Finland, which would have given them time to get at least the units down right.
On the other hand, getting the figures (and the facts) right is another matter altogether.
Superb site, anyway, and a daily stopover!
March 4th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Ops! International, not Internationale…
March 4th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
The metric system doesn’t confuse Europeans, yankee boy! And 15 km/s is just too great for an impact speed for a small meteorite! I think you have the numbers wrong!
March 4th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
It almost seems like more junk is falling from the sky… Or is it just that it’s getting easier for people to report a siting?
March 4th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I was wondering the same thing, Mike. I mean, technically stuff is constantly falling from the sky. But ever since the Canadian meteorite, as well as that west coast sighting of one around the same time, and a handful more now, one can only wonder if it’s a coincidence or if something got smacked hard in space and bits of it have been showering down in our direction?
There WAS that chunk of rock that was just discovered recently, and has passed (or will pass?) us by 60,000km’s. Makes me wonder if it was part of a collision..
Ah, speculation. It’s what fuels the imagination, doesn’t it?
March 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
How soon before analysis of all these recent meteorites can show any common “ancestors”?
Is that even likely and/or possible?
March 4th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
As I’ve said before: It’s time for the rest of the world to end the madness and switch to English units of measurement.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
@ncc1701
As long as we don’t have to switch to English cooking, too
March 4th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I think the issue is many people don’t think in m/s or km/sec so they don’t have a sense of how fast something actually is unless it’s in terms they use regularly. With news cycles being so short and the pressure to get the news out *right now*, fact checking frequently falls to the side.
For example; Most metric people know that 160 kilometres per hour is 100 miles per hour. Most would have to stop and pull out a calculator to tell you that it’s also 44 metres per second or 145 feet per second.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:01 am
the only place in Europe where there might be some confusion about the metric system is in the UK.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Always check your facts from original source… (click my name)
March 5th, 2009 at 12:29 am
WTL, that is precisely why I argue for switching to some other system with the same simplicity but more naturally sized units – say Planck units.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:54 am
@WTL: “With news cycles being so short and the pressure to get the news out *right now*, fact checking frequently falls to the side.” – But then it’s not news anymore. News minus facts equals gossip. But I guess you already knew that. Just had to get it off my chest.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:38 am
The local astronomical society (Jyväskylän Sirius; news piece over here) says around 13.5 km/s, then clarifies that to “around 50 000 km/h”.
They’re pretty glum about finding the thing as there’s a kilometer or so of uncertainty about the smack-down site (calculated from observations), and there’s a buttload of snow. (note: buttload is the unofficial SI measurement of snow depth.) Apparently it (just translating) glowed for about 3 secs, from 72 km down to 34 km, was about 300 grams by the end of it, dropped down at 200 km/h, and might be in pieces now.
(I don’t know much about astronomy or anything about the society, but hey, I can do Finnish.)
March 5th, 2009 at 1:55 am
The local astronomical society (Jyväskylän Sirius; news piece in Finnish over here: http://www.ursa.fi/sirius/sivut/uutiset.php#i119) says around 13.5 km/s, then clarifies that to “around 50 000 km/h”.
They’re pretty glum about finding the thing as there’s a kilometer or so of uncertainty about the smack-down site (calculated from observations), and there’s a buttload of snow. (note: b. is the unofficial SI measurement of snow depth.) Apparently it (just translating) was initially 500 grams, glowed for about 3 secs from 72 km down to 34 km, was about 300 grams by the end of it, dropped down at 200 km/h, and might be in pieces now.
(I don’t know much about astronomy or anything about the society, but hey, I can do Finnish.)
(Oy; made the mistake of including a link and got stuck in moderation. Thus I repost without a direct link and apologize if I end up committing the heinous sin of thus creating a double comment. Phil, if you read this, disregard the comment in moderation. Sorry sorry sorry.)
March 5th, 2009 at 2:41 am
m/s is mistake made by translator, in finnish version it’s km/s
March 5th, 2009 at 3:25 am
@ncc1701 sensible units like ….
The Bugatti Veyron has a top speed of 682,245.288 furlongs/fortnight at which it gets 41,234.1391 rods/hogshead.
To the nearest foot, 1 km = 1 mi – 2000 ft
My foot is exactly 1 ft long. Your milage may vary.
1 US gallons != 1 Imperial gallons also 1 US oz != 1 Imperial oz
And the first stage of the Saturn V generated …. darn Google won’t convert to slugs, slinches, or blobs and it’s too early my brain is melting
From a discussion at http://blog.cruachan.ca/2009/01/05/converting-to-metric/ based on an xkcd
March 5th, 2009 at 4:14 am
Could be just a bad case of the journalist getting the details wrong. It happens alot
March 5th, 2009 at 4:59 am
That 15 m/s is a translation error, it says 15km/s in the original finnish version. In any case Ursa Astronomical Association estimated that it was 13.5km/s and here’s the trajectory they’ve drawn up from the photos:
http://www.ursa.fi/blogit/media/ta/2009/maaliskuu/tulipallo2.jpg
March 5th, 2009 at 5:56 am
lets put it simple – angstrom per week seems adequate.
March 5th, 2009 at 6:31 am
What’s that in furlongs per helek?
TS: Totally agree. The UK is in a total mess regarding measurements. Hence my joke above.
March 5th, 2009 at 6:35 am
I think we should just go whole-hog on confusing people and go to a uniform system of measurements based on a log scale. That would be great: No one would know what anything meant anymore.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:33 am
@ Elwood: um… that’s the only post you’ve made. So, what joke? You mean you post under more than one name?
And on the metric/imperial confusion: yeah, 15km/s seems about right. I live in the UK, and can make rough guesses about what something in metric = in imperial, but only if they’re similarly scaled units. Like mph and kph, but I can’t do m/s to mph.
March 5th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Wow, the second one was a near miss! 8o If only I had been outside at that time…
March 5th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I understand the need for Phil to plug his book, but there’s no reason to overdo it…
“An asteroid up to twice the size of the one that levelled the forest of Tunguska, Siberia, has just whizzed perilously close to the Earth.
The rock, which is known as 2008/9 DD45 and is estimated to be between 20 and 50 metres across, passed just 72,000 kilometres above the Earth on Monday. That’s less than one fifth of the distance from here to the moon.”
http://www.asylum.co.uk/2009/03/03/massive-asteroid-narrowly-misses-the-earth
March 7th, 2009 at 4:41 am
Hello,
I leave a comment to your itemn:
“2. A big bolide was seen over Finland earlier today”
I am the person who have studied this case.
The originally only given news was in
http://www.ksml.fi/uutiset/keski-suomi/meteoriitti-iskeytyi-keski-suomen-yli-maahan/377557
(
After, and because the news expanded, then this was also put into the “Tähdet ja Avaruus” news page:
http://www.avaruus.fi/
)
I did not write that news but did see the text (although not in the very final piublished form).
The correct derived entry velocity is 13.5 km/s
This got altered to 15 km/s in some news media and further to 15 m/s in the international news.
But it is not especially good astronomy to mix errors in news media with astronomy
It is true that this will most probably not be found because of the new snow (an even without it), but I wouldn’t consider this a bad astronomy thing.
This was published originally only into one local newspaper (above), but to our surprise it expanded within minutes into national news here and then later also international, it looks.
The reason that it was (at all) published, was that it was captured (among others) into Nyrölä aurora camera and the derived landing site is only about 4 kilometrs from the obsevatory that is kept by the same person, Arto Oksanen. This arouse his interest and he wanted to give the news into the local news paper.
We, in the Finnish fireball grup are not anxious at all to make big news from our firaball-cases. It was as recently as also February ( 2009 Feb. 16/17) that we got our best (expected) meteorite dropping case here, that was very well captured in cameras, and that was estimated to have dropped an as big as about 5 kg meteorite IF of “normal chondritic” density. This was captured into eight fireball-cameras (or auroral-camera), in seven observing stations. (the case in the news “only” into five cameras in four stations).
We have not given any news from this. One might find something brief from a Finnish asrtonomy discussion group, if one would know where to look.
You can see estimated (dynamically derived masses, ie from velocity and deceleration data) meteorite masses in peer reviewed publications and only a few of these may be more or less confirmed, from found meteorite.
And this case (in the news) was among the easiest (in this respect, ie as to the ablation), in my opinion because of very low entry velocity and relatively well derived velocity behaviour to the end, although quite a lot of smoothing will of course be needed.
(But it can not vanish away (as much as I think to understand) at the very end, with low velocity (about 8 km/s in the end) when the abalation is coming to end.)
If you might like to know some further details, please ask.
Some elaborating of the data reduction could still be made, but it may depend on if any search will be made, how much of time I will denote to this, especially now that I have my hands full of work also from the previous expected bigger meteorite dropping case.
Regards,
Esko Lyytinen
Finnish fireball observing group