Shooting
stars are by nature fleeting, and it's rare one is videotaped while falling to
Earth.
But on the
evening of March 5 (at 10:59 p.m. EST, to be exact), the University of Western
Ontario's network of all-sky cameras captured video
of a large fireball, said university researcher Peter Brown.
Several
people contacted the university to say they had seen the
light. Brown and post-doctoral associate Wayne Edwards hope to enlist the
help of local residents in recovering one or more possible meteorites, which
would probably weigh about a kilogram (2.2 pounds).
"Most
meteoroids burn up by the time they hit an altitude of 60 or 70 kilometers [37
or 43 miles] from Earth," said Edwards. "We tracked this one to an
altitude of about 24 kilometers [15 miles] so we are pretty sure there are at
least one, and possibly many, meteorites that made it to the ground."
Edwards
says they can narrow the ground location where the meteorite, probably an
object from our solar system's main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter,
would have fallen to about 4.6 square miles (12 square kilometers) and have
created a
map that may assist in locating the meteorite.
"We would
love to find a recovered meteorite on this one, because we have the video and
we have the data and by putting that together with the meteorite, there is a
lot to be learned," he said.
Most of the
fallen material probably fell into nearby Lake Erie or Lake Huron, Edwards told
SPACE.com, but "some of the smaller fragments might have reached
the shore."
There is no
directed search to find the fragments, but Edwards, who studies the low
frequency sounds made by meteors moving through the atmosphere, thought it was
a good idea to put out the call to the public in case something turned up.
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