A man in California has made an amazing find after a huge fireball was seen hurling in through the sky from Sacremento, CA to Las Vegas, NV.
Robert Ward of Prescott, Arizona, who’s been hunting down meteorites for over 20 years now as he travels around the world, decided he was going to find out exactly where the mysterious object that blazed through the night sky went to and amazingly enough, he actually did!
The Telegraph writes:
The rocks each weighed about 10 grams, or the weight of two nickels, said John T Wasson, a longtime professor and expert in meteorites at UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
Experts say the flaming meteor, dating to the early formation of the solar system 4 to 5 billion years ago, was probably about the size of a minivan when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere with a loud boom early Sunday. It was seen from Sacramento, California, to Las Vegas and parts of northern Nevada.
An event of that size might happen once a year around the world, said Don Yeomans of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But most of them occur over the ocean or an uninhabited area, he said.
“Getting to see one is something special,” he said. He added, “Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand, and their trail lasts all of a second or two.”
The meteor probably weighed about 70,000 kilograms, said Bill Cooke, a specialist in meteors at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. At the time of disintegration, he said, it probably released energy equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons.
Read more at telegraph.co.uk