Experts have been scratching their heads over a Brobdingnagian , bright fireball that zoomed out of the sky over Texas yesterday . newsman and the FAA claim it was satellite debris , but astronomers say they ’re wrong .
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has a terrific dislocation of events , explain how rumour of satellite debris got started and the misinformation was communicate around . flurry matters was the fact that two satellite collided over Earth a couple of hebdomad ago , so it ’s possible we might see some debris hitting the major planet after such an result . Plus , there was another fireball over Kentucky on Friday . This compounding of cistron hadpeople believing a pelting of satellite part was fallingover the American South .
But after watching the video and doing research on the upshot , Plait enunciate definitively that it ’s notspace junk :
The telecasting show the fireball to be moving very rapidly . Typically , meteors come into Earth ’s atmosphere at 20 - 50 km / sec ( though they can be moving much faster ) , and burn up 50 - 100 km high . Man - made blank space debris re - entering is moving at slower than orbital speed so the max speed is about 8 km / sec . It also burn up lower , and mostly you could see flames and whatnot number off .
I ’ve see man - made junk re - enter , and it ’s very different than natural meteors . The difference in speed is very obvious . properly there , that ’s enough to make me believe this was a single raw object .
It ’s possible to get collisional rubble be active more rapidly , but it ’s difficult . The two satellites closed in on each other at about 10 km / sec , and any shrapnel from that consequence would most in all likelihood be go at roughly that same fastness . If one satellite slammed into , say , an transmitting aerial first , then the lower mass transmitting aerial might get a pretty hefty acceleration from it , but the amount of energy dumped into it would most likely grow it into a bunch of teeny piece ( remember , the energy of wallop was like several heaps of TNT ) . A little objective would not have been as bright as the human dynamo seen .
Also , you ’d have to have a pretty special readiness of setting to get any debris from the satellites to re - enter our atmosphere so soon after the hit . It ’s far more probable that it will be months before we see any of that shrapnel combust up .
So all in all , I am moderately certain what was seen was natural : a rock or a piece of metal from an asteroid .
Read moreover at Bad Astronomy !
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