Jessica Meszaros and Brandon Wise/FIUSM Staff
When you wish upon a star, make sure it stays in the sky first.
Residents of South Florida looked up this past Sunday and saw a ball of light resembling a meteor in the sky. The sighting duration was recorded at about three seconds.
Two days prior to the South Florida sighting, Russia witnessed a meteor blazing across the western Siberian sky. The meteor exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, injuring more than 1,000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million, according to the Associated Press.
According to physics and astronomy professor Walter Van Hamme, these are fairly common occurrences.
“It’s basically the solid piece of material hitting a dense area in the atmosphere,” said Van Hamme. “It’s very similar to throwing a snowball against a wall, for example. As soon as it hits the wall, the impact will break down the object.”
Professor of Physics James Webb recalled seeing a similar meteor when he was studying at the University of Florida as a grad student in the 1980s.
“I actually saw a fairly bright one when I was a grad student, it exploded over Gainesville in 1988,” said Webb. “It wasn’t as big as the one in Russia, it didn’t do any damage.”
The largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century occurred hours before a 150-foot asteroid passed within about 17,000 miles (28,000 kilometers) of Earth.
The European Space Agency said its experts had determined there was no connection between the asteroid and the Russian meteor — just cosmic coincidence, according to the AP.
The AP reported that the shock wave blew in an estimated 100,000 square meters (more than 1 million square feet) of glass, according to city officials, who said 3,000 buildings in Chelyabinsk were damaged. In addition, part of the roof collapsed at a zinc factory.
“In all likelihood most of the damage was caused by the shock wave. As the object collides with the atmosphere, this sort of shock propagates through the atmosphere,” said Van Hamme. He added that the amount of shock would shatter glass windows.
Daniella Roberts, treasurer of the Astronomy Club at FIU, described what people saw over South Florida was similar to the one that hit Russia, but not quite the same.
“The report in Miami wasn’t an impact, it burned up in the atmosphere,” Roberts said. “We saw the ball of fire and it dissipated. Those are actually what we call shooting stars.”
Van Hamme said that meteorites are difficult to detect. He said that if they are out of the earth’s atmosphere, they are typically small and dark. Even a “big telescope” could miss it, he said.
The only thing that civilians can do to help the detection of meteorites, according to Van Hamme, is to “support NASA in their endeavors to observe the skies as much as they can to catalog all the available pieces of asteroids and material that are floating out there.”
However, Webb believes that without an active space program, it is like we are giving up our ability to track these asteroids.
“The big one, like the asteroid that just missed us, we can track. We have the capability and technology to do something about it before it becomes an issue, Webb said. “If we can detect it early enough, we can calculate their orbits and see if they will be a threat or not.”
Without an active space program, Webb thinks that the planet is at risk of similar situations to the one that occurred in Russia.
“A lot of this stuff is avoidable,” said Webb. “We have the technology.”
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