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Spectacular Fireball Lights Up UK Sky
The Bad Astronomer writes "An extremely bright meteor burned up over Ireland and the northern UK around 22:00 UTC on Friday night, and was apparently witnessed by thousands of people. It traveled east to west, and was moving relatively slowly. It may have been an actual rock, or it may have been some human-made space debris — a satellite or rocket booster — burning up. Space junk tends to move more slowly, so that's a potential suspect, though orbiting debris usually moves in the opposite direction. I'm collecting pictures and images on my Bad Astronomy blog."
... but it was aliens...
It started out much like these videos. A bright head with a trail behind it, but then the object exploded, spraying material in all directions and burned out very quickly.
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I didn't hear about his Virgin Fireball project yet.
Was that, by sheer coincidence, around pub closing time . . . ?
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I was watching this went out for a smoke saw something bright and green coming directly towards me. I live close to an airport so thought it was just a plane coming in to land at a funny approach. After a minute or 2 it started getting bigger and brighter still coming directly towards me then a piece fell off it with a massive trail and I realised what it was (late night i was being slow). Continued to watch it as it kept getting bigger and bigger. Almost directly overhead and it split into loads of little pieces from green to orange they all developed massive trails and then just vanished there was nothing blocking my view and I was looking almost vertical at this point so I must have just caught the end of it. Would be nice to know where it actually impacted as by the time it vanished it was bright enough it was actually lighting up the fields around me.
I wish I hadn't gone to bed early last night...
Here's a little video from Ireland.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6BZF8dhYJI
When it travelled east to west, it most likely wasn't human-made space debris.
I saw this over Sweden as well, exactly that time yesterday.
I thought it was party fireworks from our neighbors that had a party that night, so I didn't think about it until I thought it was a bit funny that there where no firework sounds, no explosions.
But that red ball that floated around was sure big and bright. I really honestly just thought it was your average red flare.
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...will go blind and be eaten by ambulatory carnivorous plants. Sorry to deliver the bad news.
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Very true. Odds are against it but...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_satellites_in_retrograde_orbit
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It's supposed to be the 21 of December 2012 according to local kooks. But I found 21 of September by searching google...
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The reasoning behind my speculation is as follows:
(1) According to an article in Science News and others referenced from Slashdot, the Moon appears to be from 2 moons, both from the mantle, no major asteroid content, thus no mars-sized asteroid.
(2) If that is the case, then the best explanation is de Meijer's critical georeactor theory: calcium bergs blew up in the mantle. But...
(3) the de Meijer theory falls down based on the fact that the uranium/calcium bergs would create enough vapor pressure in going critical, that they wouldn't go sufficiently supercritical to blow out a major fraction of the moon, unless a *small* asteroid knocked one of them into the center of a group, or if another blast created shockwaves that compressed a collection of U-Ca bergs together. So it *does* require a small asteroid.
(4) If that is so, then due to the neutron bombardment, the U-Th, U-Pb, Pb-Pb dating of rocks is going to be off, but there will be great scatter in the estimated ages, and the event will be more recent than the dating indicates (2.3- billion years). But
(5) we have earth rocks that date older than that, too. So we should have evidence of the locations. That is, the Earth's crust should show evidence of the blast.
(6) Such a blast would shatter the Earth's crust, leaving rings of Kimberlites around the blast zone, that dated younger (because the rings are structural failures, and less contaminated by neutrons), while the center would date older, being more contaminated.
(7) Two such locations exist: the 850 mi-radius ring of Kimberlites around the Hudson Bay (search Canada kimberlite, and Greenland kimberlite), and the ring of Kimberlites around Vredefort that stretches from Brazil, through Africa, through North India, and into Austrailia.
(8) According to plate tectonics, both rings align correctly at the Permian extinction. Both rings have central rocks dating to about the age of the moon,
(9) At the site of the Vredefort blast, you have an area called the African Karoo. The lava sills (light gray in this picture) are excluded from a region which is heavy in Kimberlites, and indeed includes the city of Kimberly. The shape, size, and location of the excluded zone, at 230 ma ago, exactly matches the shape size and location of the Scotia plate, which remains volcanic to this day.
What this makes me think happened, is that an asteroid hit at an oblique angle at the location of a collection of georeactors, near the South Sandwich islands. The blast went supercritical, and blew out a close to half of the moon. most of the blast going back through the asteroid scar, but a lot of it going straight out. Crustally speaking, the blast destroyed whatever continent existed to the west.
The blast also sent shock waves through the earth. 1/3 of the way around the globe, another collection of georeactors was forced supercritical, creating a symmetrically round blast (the Hudson and its k
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's