meteor likely to have made ground just outside Berlin

[Tomatobro]

There are reports that a small asteroid was tracked and timed to enter Germany airspace last night. early reports suggest that small fragments have made landfall 50 miles west of  Berlin.

[JeremyS]

Details from the BAA here: https://britastro.org/forums/topic/2024-bx1-small-neo-impact-last-night

[John]

Quite a large chunk.

The Barwell Meteorite in 1965 was thought to be about as large as a turkey before it broke up. That is the largest UK fall.

 

[maw lod qan]

I wonder just how large it was. How small of an object can observatories image? 

For a small object to be imaged it must have been really close. At 10,000 mph the moon would be just a day away!

[Captain Scarlet]

There was also the Winchcombe meteorite that fell onto a driveway in Winchcombe Gloucestershire UK about a year ago

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/september/winchcombe-meteorite-driveway-on-its-way-to-the-museum.html

Magnus

[andrew63]

Good record on here of event with footage, quite a spectacle. 

https://www.imo.net/2024-bx1-8th-predicted-earth-impact/

[John]

13 minutes ago, andrew63 said:

Good record on here of event with footage, quite a spectacle. 

https://www.imo.net/2024-bx1-8th-predicted-earth-impact/

If it landed in a biggish chunk that would make an impact pit of some sort which will help folks looking for it. Stony meteorites (eg: Winchcombe, Barwell etc) usually break up in the atmosphere and come to earth in small bits. An iron though might make it all the way down more or less in one piece or at least in larger pieces (eg: Sikhote-Alin). The meteorite hunters will be out in force around the likely fall area, as reported later in that thread 🙂

Edited January 23 by John

[Leo S]

On 21/01/2024 at 18:03, maw lod qan said:

I wonder just how large it was. How small of an object can observatories image? 

For a small object to be imaged it must have been really close. At 10,000 mph the moon would be just a day away!

It was estimated to be around 1m.

Certainly at that size many observatories will be at their limits, and it would have to be close. In this case there were only a couple of hours notice, and I think we are unlikely to get much more notice with objects this size, until the tech improves - but it's improving rapidly. Still very impressive to be able to spot something this small with a few hours to spare.

[Leo S]

 

[Leo S]

They have now recovered meteorites!

[JOC]

Do they get to keep them?

[John]

5 hours ago, JOC said:

Do they get to keep them?

If found on public access land I believe they can keep them. Otherwise they belong to the landowner. I hope a sample gets to a recognised meteorite analysis lab quickly so that it can be determined to be of extra-terrestrial origin and the exact meteorite type identified. The recent fall at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire has turned out to be a rare type - a carbonaceous-chondrite:

 Gloucestershire meteorite is first UK find in 30 years - BBC News

 

[JOC]

I still think I got hit by a meteorite when I was driving home one day.  A small brown/red stone came flying down from the sky and hit and damaged my windscreen, then it rebounded flying off somewhere to the side of the road as I drove along.   I do not know where it else it could have come from and often wondered if it was a meteorite.

[Paul M]

I'm mesmerised by the this story. 

I saw a headline elsewhere on the Interweb about NASA predicting a small body impact just hours after its discovery.

It all sounded a bit Daily Express so I didn't follow it up. But wow! It did happen.

I'm not overly excited about the find, but imaging it as it heads imbound, and then the predicted meteor/bolide right on cue! Great stuff!

To paraphrase on old joke, I couldnt't work out why that asteroid was just getting bigger, then, wham! it hit me!

[Captain Scarlet]

5 hours ago, JOC said:

I still think I got hit by a meteorite when I was driving home one day.  A small brown/red stone came flying down from the sky and hit and damaged my windscreen, then it rebounded flying off somewhere to the side of the road as I drove along.   I do not know where it else it could have come from and often wondered if it was a meteorite.

I can think of an alternative. Do aircraft toilets discharge straight into the airstream and/or are they allowed to do it over ground? They’d be frozen before they hit ground.

M

[Leo S]

14 hours ago, Paul M said:

I'm mesmerised by the this story. 

I saw a headline elsewhere on the Interweb about NASA predicting a small body impact just hours after its discovery.

It all sounded a bit Daily Express so I didn't follow it up. But wow! It did happen.

I'm not overly excited about the find, but imaging it as it heads imbound, and then the predicted meteor/bolide right on cue! Great stuff!

To paraphrase on old joke, I couldnt't work out why that asteroid was just getting bigger, then, wham! it hit me!

Not sure if you were aware, but this was actually the 8th predicted asteroid impact. Each event so far has been amazing to follow, and the frequency is bound to increase as we discover more of the smaller incoming ones before they are due to hit, so should be plenty of opportunity to image these events in the future. I already have a "grab and go" kit bag ready if another close by impact is forecast! Of course the 7th (you can find more on this if you look back through old IMO news), which would have been visible from here except for the cloud will probably mean that we missed our chance for a while, but there are still plenty of large fireballs that get through with out being predicted.  One of my cameras caught this near -8mag fragmenting fireball a couple of weeks back for example.

[Leo S]

NASA just issued a warning over a close approach of a "football pitch" sized object that is due to buzz us this Friday at a distance of "just" 7.5 LD. No danger of impact, but it is on the large side, hence the warning.

There is actually an increase in fireball rates in the N hemisphere every year around this time of year, so it's no surprise that there is plenty of news about at the moment, but the main point I want to emphasize here is that, right now we are only detecting a tiny proportion of the smaller ~1m sized objects - of which there are many. I would guestimate that these impact every few days, but of course most would occur over sea or uninhabited/sparely inhabited areas and might not get reported.

I always like to check spaceweather.com for the recent/upcoming near Earth asteroid approaches (scroll down a bit to the table), as well as to see what else is going on in the sky. It's interesting to see how the chart changes, and if you look at the asteroid names, which include the year of discovery you can get a sense of just how many new discoveries are being made on an almost daily basis. Right now the chart is surprisingly "quiet", but that is sure to change!

As an aside, I was able to run my cameras all evening yesterday, and managed to catch a smaller event that was reported as a fireball, although I'm not sure it was quite bright enough to qualify as a fireball, but it might have been. This was one of 3 reported events last night reported by people in the UK.

[Marvin Jenkins]

I do hope the players on the pitch don't get distracted by the sight of planet Earth appearing to wizz by.

I think we have been here before with abstract descriptions of size. What would a football pitch sized object look like? A green sheet of paper with lines and goals.

Wasn't there a size approximation to a giraffe once?

Marv

[Leo S]

Well the length of the pitch only gives you an idea of the asteroid's diameter or longest dimension, but of course asteroids are not 2 dimensional.

In this case the asteroid which is estimated at 285m (is a pitch really that large?) is going to be significantly bigger than a giraffe - it's s bit smaller than the size of asteroid Apophis whose size you can get an idea of in the video here.

In the image below, it would fall somewhere between the Eiffel Tower and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Asteroids of this size would certainly have global ramifications if they impacted!

[John]

There is some interesting information on all this at the Spaceguard website:

The Spaceguard Centre | The National Near Earth Objects Information Centre

Edited January 31 by John

[Leo S]

On 31/01/2024 at 21:59, John said:

There is some interesting information on all this at the Spaceguard website:

The Spaceguard Centre | The National Near Earth Objects Information Centre

Ironically I only found out about Spaceguard after we'd moved, but before that we lived almost just down the road from it for 8 years.

[Leo S]

Another sizable fireball over Europe a few nights back - there have been others in the mean time, but this one was imaged.

Here's one image, credit cyrille a: