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The hunt for fragments of an “unusually large meteor“that lit up Norway’s skies on July 25 has begun. The meteor woke stunned residents of the country’s capital, Oslo, with the sound of a large explosion.
The footage shows the meteor’s fireball crossing the sky in a trail of brilliant lightning around 1 a.m. local time on Sunday morning before landing somewhere in a forest near Oslo.
The roar of the meteor surprised many residents and led to calls for Norwegian emergency services, although no injuries or damage have yet been reported, Norwegian police said.
Related: Tales from space: the 5 strangest meteorites
The Norwegian Meteor Network (NMN), a group that monitors meteor activity in the country, analyzed video footage of the extraplanetary visitor’s path to locate its landing site, which the group believes to be somewhere in the forest. from Finnemarka, located 40 miles (60 kilometers) from Oslo.
“My wife and I heard a loud rumble and saw two powerful flashes of light”, Morten Bilet, meteor collector and member of the NMN, says World Gang, a Norwegian newspaper. “It’s definitely a big meteor that has hit eastern Norway. It’s a big deal.”
The meteor was traveling at 43,200 miles per hour (72,000 km per hour) and lit the sky for five to six seconds, according to the NMN. The pressure wave from the meteor also caused a strong gust of wind, the group said.
Bilet told Reuters news agency that the meteor was deflected back to Earth when it struck our solar system’s asteroid belt while traveling between Mars and Jupiter, but other details on l he arrival of another world remains elusive.
“With an object of this size, it’s almost impossible to get a big picture of absolutely everything,” Bilet said. “It would have been easier if he had had a steeper course. We don’t yet know if it was a boulder or an iron meteorite. From experience it is more likely. whether it is a rock, but we can not yet draw any conclusions. ” Stone or rock meteorites tend to form on the surface or crust of a planet or large asteroid, while iron meteorites originate from the planet or the asteroid’s core.
The NMN conducted a search for fragments of the meteor on Sunday morning and in the afternoon. The group suspects that, given the difficult-to-find location somewhere in the middle of a forest, any meteorite fragment could take up to 10 years to uncover.
Meteors are small pieces of space rock that can be as small as grains of sand or as large as boulders about 3 feet (1 meter) wide and are scattered throughout the solar system. Much like the largest rocks in space, called asteroids, they are remnants of the formation of planets.
The flaming rock that roared and flashed above Oslo was a special type of meteor called a “fireball” meteor, defined as any meteor emitting light of equal or greater intensity than that of Venus in the night sky, according to the American Meteor Society. (AMS).
Fireballs burn brightly due to their size and speed, which creates a significant amount of friction when rocks hit Earth’s atmosphere. As space rocks enter the atmosphere at speeds far exceeding the sound barrier, they also cause a sonic boom, which is likely the cause of the explosion heard by the people of Oslo. Several thousand fireball meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, but most go unnoticed because they are not bright enough to be seen with the naked eye or they pass over uninhabited areas, according to the AMS.
A fireball meteor was observed passing over England, Wales and northern France in March 2021, Live Science previously reported. That same month, a meteor the size of a bowling ball exploded over Vermont with the force of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of TNT, Live Science previously reported.
The most explosive meteor event in recent history occurred near Chelyabinsk in central Russia in 2013. When the meteor struck the atmosphere, it created an explosion roughly equivalent to 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. . Balls of fire fell in and around Chelyabinsk, damaging buildings, shattering windows and injuring around 1,200 people.
Originally published by Live Science.
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