Meteors over England!

[Kyle]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/meteor-mania-huge-comet-spotted-1337427

Anyone over in England get to see this by chance? Apparently it was bright enough to wake people up.

 

[Notebook]

Its in the news today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19683687

Didn't see it myself, and if it happened when the pubs were open, half the UK would have been seeing bright lights in the sky anyway...

N.

 

[george7378]

I think one of my friends videoed this and put it on Facebook.

 

[GoForPDI]

This was very visible from Glasgow (a pretty big and bright city), so I'm gutted I didn't see it.

Also, just for the sake of being pedantic.. England does not equal Britain, this was mostly visible over Scotland and Northern Ireland, many people phoned the emergency services up here!

the British Isles = the UK + the Republic of Ireland
the UK = England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales

Don't hate on me now, my goal is to educate the world of the difference between England and Britain!

 

[Sky Captain]

Looks too slow to be a meteor. Few meteors I have managed to see were much faster burning bright white and lasting few seconds. Maybe it was some space junk entering atmosphere at much slower LEO velocity.

 

[n72.75]

The reentry angle was a bit shallow; also Alba gu bràth!

 

[GoForPDI]

The reentry angle was a bit shallow; also Alba gu bràth!

 

[Notebook]

Bit more info:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19683687

From the UK....


N.

 

[orb]

Discover Magazine - Bad Astronomy: UPDATE on the big UK fireball:

{...}

Marco Langbroek is a paleolithic archaeologist in Amsterdam, and also an amateur satellite tracker – though with modern tech, the term "amateur" is arguable. Anyway, he’s been looking at the track and velocity of the meteor using eyewitness accounts (and the video taken), and thinks he can rule out the cause being the re-entry of human-made debris from a spacecraft. In fact, he thinks the meteoroid (the term for the actual object responsible for the light show) was an Aten asteroid: part of a class of rocks that orbit the Sun on paths that tend to keep them inside Earth’s orbit.

The key issues here are the slow speed it moved across the sky, and the fact it moved east-to-west. That last part is really important: very few satellites orbit retrograde, or in that direction. Most orbit either prograde – west-to-east, the same direction the Earth spins and also the same direction it orbits the Sun – or in polar orbits (north/south). So right away that makes it unlikely the meteor was from a spacecraft.

However, what has me scratching my head is the slow speed of the meteor. A rock orbiting the Sun retrograde means its velocity will add to the Earth’s, making it move faster as it burns up, not slower. It’s like two cars in a head-on collision; if each is moving 100 km/hr then the resulting collision speed is 200 km/hr relative to either car. You get slower relative collisions if they’re moving in the same direction; they’ll merely bump at low speed relative to one another.

{...}

So why was this meteor over the UK moving so slowly if it were an Aten? Marco thinks he has the answer to that. If the asteroid happened to be at aphelion – the top of its orbit, when it’s farthest from the Sun, also when moving most slowly and in a direction nearly parallel with that of the Earth – it would all add up. The backwards direction and the slow motion would be a natural consequence of this.


I’ll note that as far as I have thought about this, I agree with Marco. It’s not conclusive yet, though, but it’s compelling.

{...}