Rare ‘Earthgrazer’ Meteor Flew 186 Miles Over 3 States

Skywatchers in Georgia and Alabama had been handled to a wonderful mild present this Tuesday when a uncommon earthgrazing meteor zoomed throughout the night time sky.

The vivid fireball grew to become seen at 6:39 p.m. ET on November 9, and it was so vivid that some skywatchers had been nonetheless in a position to see it by partially overcast skies, as NASA Meteor Watch explained on its Facebook web page. The object first appeared above Taylorsville, Georgia, transferring northwest at 38,500 miles per hour (61,960 kilometers per hour) and at an altitude of 55 miles (89 km) above Earth.

The meteor hunters had been in a position to calculate the thing’s trajectory and orbit thanks to 3 NASA meteor cameras within the area, however some additional quantity crunching was required because of the shocking size of its journey by Earth’s environment.

The fireball seen over Georgia and Alabama “was what we call an earthgrazer, in which the meteor’s trajectory is so shallow it just skims across the upper atmosphere for a long distance,” in accordance with NASA Meteor Watch. On uncommon events, earthgrazers will even “bounce off” the environment and enterprise again into area. That didn’t occur on this case, because the meteor finally disintegrated.

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This particular meteor entered our atmosphere at an angle of 5 degrees from the horizontal, according to NASA, allowing it to travel as a fireball for a long distance. As the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook post explained, “its path was so long that our automated software could not handle all the data,” so the team ran another analysis code the following morning and discovered that the meteor traveled not 91 miles (147 km) as originally reported, “but but a whopping 186 miles [300 km] through the air.” The updated calculations place the end point of the meteor’s journey above Lufts, a town in southern Tennessee. So technically, this meteor flew over three states.

Because the meteor’s light was dimmed by overcast skies, the team was not able to estimate the object’s size. Still, it’s a “rare meteor for those fortunate enough to see it,” as NASA Meteor Watch writes.

This specific kind of astronomical phenomena is uncommon, however skywatchers in South Carolina caught a particularly long one on May 14, 2014, when an earthgrazer flew 290 miles by the environment earlier than burning up.

More: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is getting completely clobbered by mud.