Meteor observations intensify

Years ago among astronomers it was marked with a fundamental difference that it had to be said that meteoroids were those of less than 40 to 50 m in diameter, those that were larger could already be considered asteroids, but in recent years the term meteoroid is used rather little, it is really only used for those less than 10 m and normally in the context of whether they enter the Earth's atmosphere, where most of the cases end up exploding or disintegrating at high altitude, although its fragments can reach to impact with the ground, as has happened in recent days.

Once they reach the ground, these fragments are when they can be called meteorites, they can also be called bolides or fireballs, although they are not really what surrounds them anymore, these objects shine because upon entering the atmosphere tens of thousands of kilometers per hour they compress the air in their path, they compress it in such a brutal way that they generate an incandescent and very bright plasma, this also raises the temperature of the outer layer of the object to thousands of degrees Celsius, causing them to vaporize. or explode.

Curiously, if a fragment of the object's core reaches the ground, that is, it becomes a meteorite, it could be cold to the touch, since the heat did not have time to penetrate into the object, but I do not recommend that you pick up a meteorite by hand, a recently fallen one is a scientific treasure and you could contaminate it with your DNA, bacteria or the natural oil that we all have on our skin.

It is exactly the same as what happens with meteor showers, they are meteors that burn when they enter the Earth's atmosphere, the difference is in the size, meteor showers are caused by very small fragments, the size of a grain of rice or a €1 coin or a little more. To be a fireball or fireball, the object has to be larger, greater than the size of a tennis ball and therefore it also shines more intensely. In fact, to be classified as a fireball it must shine more intensely than the planet Venus and if its brightness exceeds that of the full moon, it can be called a superbolide, of course, this is a bit relative because the brightness of one of these objects at night is not the same as some that are seen during the day, when one is seen during the day it is really one of the big ones and it shines very much.

These images published by the European Space Agency are of the first of this streak of fireballs or fireballs, it exploded over Koblenz in Germany on March 8, several fragments impacted the surface and one of them made a hole the size of a soccer ball in the roof of a house and other fragments caused minor damage to other homes, fortunately, there were no injuries.

The next event was on March 11, it was visible in the south of France and Spain with more than 236 reports, after the one on March 17 that was sighted during the day, which indicates that it must have been very bright, it was in the skies of Ohio, in the United States, it is estimated that this particular one must have been about 2 m in diameter and weighed about 7 tons, which is equivalent to a male African elephant. The explosion that caused it was estimated to be equivalent to about 250 tons of TNT, which caused a strong sonic boom shaking houses and windows. A possible impact was also reported on a house in the Spring area.

On March 21 in Houston they experienced another fireball and in fact one of the fragments went through the roof of a house in the north of the city, bouncing off the ground and hitting the roof again. The meteoroid was estimated to be 1 m in diameter and weighed close to a ton. Luckily, there were no injuries.

To this we must add other fireballs that were seen in California, Michigan, Georgia, Vancouver and more places. Some have justified these events as an informational contagion effect, because okay, it is true that when an event goes viral, the media sets its sights on any similar event and news that would have been local or would not have even been news suddenly appears on national or even global news.

And it is certainly very possible because in the reports these days there are cases of minor fireballs that normally, I guarantee you, would not have come from the social networks of astronomy fans. Another argument given to this phenomenon is that currently there are cameras everywhere capable of recording and covering millions of places throughout the world, from surveillance cameras to cameras that are installed in vehicles and, of course, all the cameras on the mobile phones of billions of users, so currently it has never been so easy to record these phenomena of the cosmos, which also in most cases last only a few seconds.

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