Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts
nbcboston.com
nbcboston.com
Our puck showed a 90.8dB sound level compared to a 55dB baseline.
We thought a tree had hit the house because of the double boom. That was a repeated observation across all the local social media groups. The local UPS driver, who was outside at the time, said he "felt it in his chest".
Interesting this also happened in South Carolina and Ohio within the past few months.
Sounds like the beginning of an alien invasion movie. Sleeper ships buried themselves into every state. Waiting for the mother ship to arrive.
Not that interesting, apparently this scale of meteor happens on average multiple times a year, just not usually over such an urban area.
The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor (1) was larger and caused ground damage and injuries from e.g. flying glass from broken windows.
> Sounds like the beginning of an alien invasion movie. Sleeper ships buried themselves into every state.
Based on the last Alien invasion book that I read (2), it would rather start with air bursting the bioweapons, spreading the plagues to weaken us. Which ah, also fits this incident.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Chtorr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution
It's not interesting in the scientific sense of being an outlier, unusual and noteworthy. It isn't, it's a common enough occurrence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PEI/comments/1tgzjie/loud_bang_4pm/
I thought it was the firing of replica cannons or something similar in the Harbor, but was definitely loud enough that people took notice.
Honestly what spooked me the most was seeing nothing on the horizon to help explain it! I am shocked and grateful it didn’t break any windows or cause further damage.
Okay, maybe that's beer and closer to Waltham =P
We didn’t notice it in Southern NH, but it seemed our thunderstorm phobic dog did feel the pressure change or hear it.
According to its Wikipedia entry, "Rubin is expected to catalog millions of supernovae, more than five million asteroids (including ~100,000 near-Earth objects), and image approximately 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies." [2]
I guess this this reported meteor is the one that got away, or perhaps it's beyond its scope of monitoring the Southern sky. But even if it's monitoring the Northern hemisphere it will most probably going to miss it due to the puny size of the meteor, more like a small tent instead of a skyscrapper.
>The meteor was about five feet wide, according to the space agency, with a mass of 5.6 metric tons (that's about the weight of a large elephant.)
[1] Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids and Failed Supernovas:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352500
[2] Vera C. Rubin Observatory:
I've never experienced this before so I figure we've witnessed something truly rare and special that might not happen again in our lifetimes.
The ".ai" stands for "Asteroid Institute." It was started by two former astronauts, Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart.
Meteor is a rock in space or in the atmosphere.
Meteorite is the rock after it touches the ground.
Falling/shooting star is the flash of light.
I have never heard of meteor being the flash of light.
Although, the title is kind of misleading.
> with a mass of 5.6 metric tons (that's about > the weight of a large elephant.)
Elephant-sized meteor sounds scary. Must have been many elephants that extinctified the dinosaur.
I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"?
The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.
The only other things I can think of that would create a similar kind of blast are a volcanic eruption or something like that fertilizer explosion in Beirut in 2020 (~1100 tons TNT equivalent.)
But it's meaningless, unless you're a demolitions engineer. What's the volume of a ton of TNT? I guess - within a factor of two - about the same as a ton of water? So a cubic meter? Who knows?
NASA: "Yep, that's a rock!"
A breakup will increase surface area and therefore kinetic energy to shockwave transfer efficiency, still not an explosion.
It would however, be incorrect to claim that the meteor had noting to do with explosions.
The term makes people think atmospheric heating causes an actual steam explosion and that's the source of shockwave, which can't be further from truth.
If you were to witness the breakup from the bolide's reference frame and without all the rushing air you'd never call it an explosion.
That's the exploding bit though. You don't need containment, you just need the the airburst. A hyper-heated pocket of air that then expands rapidly is itself an explosion.
Except it doesn't. The breakup has roughly the same dynamics as dirt spreading as it gets out of a tip truck. The shockwave is not produced by the outward motion, it barely has any speed.
The shockwave is traveling at the speed of sound.
PSA: expressing an opinion (incorrect or otherwise) is not actually a public service announcement
The meteors made only of iron alloy and/or silicate rocks do not explode, but they may fragment into many smaller bodies.
The meteors that contain great amounts of volatile substances (water, carbon compounds and sulfur compounds) may explode if the interior becomes hot enough to convert the volatiles into gases. When such a meteor rich in volatiles fragments, some of the fragments may explode, while others may reach the surface of the Earth intact.
PSA is false.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/watch-the-skies/2026/03/26/its-fi...
NASA states: "the fragmentation of the fireball unleashes large amounts of energy, which also generates a pressure wave that can produce a very loud boom, even shaking houses."
Fragmentation of a fireball, whilst not explosive itself (the particles needn't diverge at a supersonic relative velocity) are nonetheless part of a supersonic / hypersonic particle field relative to the atmosphere they are passing through. Expanding the diameter of that particle field will increase the size of the resultant shockwave, whether the particle separation itself is "explosive" or not.
The "explosion" then is of the deceleration (aerobraking) shockwave, not the bolide separation. But the bolide separation increases the intensity of the shockwave, with more (and lighter) particles interacting with the atmosphere over a shorter distance than an intact, small-diameter bolide would.
Some of this depends on what definition of "explosion" one chooses, or whether people are intending an explosion specifically, or an explosive sound (sonic boom). That's confounded by bolide separation, the bright light emitted on entry, and sonic effects, all of which are semantically associated with other explosive events. Language is a consensus phenomenon.
I'd tend to call the event an explosion, though not in the expanding particle field sense.
I didn't state that the shockwave is independent of whether or not the body breaks up, I wrote, emphasised, "Expanding the diameter of that particle field will increase the size of the resultant shockwave, whether the particle separation itself is "explosive" or not."
Which your article (partially read, sorry, incredibly shitty reader) largely substantiates, largely in the itemised list in section 2.2. Pancaking of a bolide through fragmentation increases frontal area, has multiple points of mass interacting with the atmosphere over a larger area and with less mass at each point, and the (undiscussed) light-emission mechanism which itself largely derives from compressive heating and ionisation of the atmosphere (rather than friction against the atmosphere or heating of bolide particles themselves). Increasing the number, and surface areas, of particles increases the region and intensity of this effect.
As your source discusses, most fragmentation is a result of mechanical rather than thermal forcing of the bolide.
"jojobas and NASA's statements aren't contradictory."
jojobas wrote:
"PSA: meteors have nothing to do with explosions."
>You're being excessively argumentative.
You're defending idiocy. The PSA is false. There is science behind it. There is little nuance to salvage in any of it.
This is the same like how many kinds of water containing things, e.g. raw meat, eggs, fruits, can explode in a microwave oven if the microwave power is too high.
The meteor bodies belong to several classes of chemical compositions. Some of them contain very little volatiles, and they are made either of iron alloy or of silicate rocks or of a mixture of iron alloy and silicate rocks. These do not explode, at most they fragment into many smaller bodies.
Other classes contain great amounts of volatiles, e.g. water, organic compounds and sulfur compounds, and they frequently explode, depending on their size, shape and trajectory, i.e. if there is enough time for the interior to be heated to high temperatures, causing the phase change of the volatiles to gases.
Meteors and eggs do not normally explode, but under the right circumstances.. Boom!
Breakup, impact, fly-by? all those could be incorrect if all you know is a space object entered the atmosphere, made a sound, and flashed some light. What do you call that? Especially because you don't automatically know if it impacted the surface. At which point it becomes a meteorite, so even calling it a meteor is not fully correct. Or do you get ultra technical and say that when it made the sound and flash, it had not yet reached the ground, therefore it was a meteor at the time?