Why the daytime fireball meteor that blasted over Atlanta was a rare sight
"It's very hard for us to see daytime meteors," Georgia Tech planetary scientist Masatoshi Hirabayashi told FOX Weather. "The reason is the sun is the first objection … Location is critical. Many are actually occurring, not only on the continent, but also in the ocean."
With more than 70% of the Earth covered in water, many meteors fall over the ocean.
"This time it happened in Georgia, so people you know found that event, so could you record it," Hirabayashi said. "The timing is very important."
Hirabayashi is currently part of three ongoing spaceflight missions to study asteroids, including NASA's Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids.
The fireball was spotted from Virginia to Georgia around noon with more than 200 reports submitted to the American Meteor Society (AMS) website. The AMS said the daytime meteor was a bolide.
A fireball is a very bright meteor – brighter than magnitude 4 – roughly equivalent to the brilliance of Venus in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a specific type of fireball that culminates in a spectacular explosion of light, often accompanied by visible fragments.
Hirabayashi said the videos captured across the Southeast show this two-part explosion typical of a bolide.
"It exploded and it fragmented into multiple pieces or numerous pieces and eventually falling onto the ground as meteorites," he said.
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Pieces of the suspected meteor damaged a home in Henry County, Georgia, southeast of Atlanta, putting a hole in the roof and ceiling.
While tiny objects crash into our planet all the time, understanding these smaller asteroids is important for planetary defense. If a sample of the meteor in Georgia is collected, it provides more information about the millions of objects in our solar system.
"By looking at meteorites, we can understand where they come from," he said.
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In 2013, a larger fireball event in Chelyabinsk, Russia propagated shockwaves shattering thousands of windows and injuring people. That meteor was also small, believed to be about 20 meters. According to Hirabayashi, these smaller asteroids, under 100 meters, are hard to track.
"The issue is what's going to happen in terms of impact events. We pretty much know (about) those larger than 100 meters. But when it comes to smaller than that, we do not have enough data," Hirabayashi said. "We have to assess how we would be able to mitigate if that would happen or if it is about to happen."
The scientific community just got a leg-up from the new National Science Foundation's Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which found more than 2,000 previously unknown asteroids in our solar system over 10 hours of observations.Original article source: Why the daytime fireball meteor that blasted over Atlanta was a rare sight
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