This morning (september 24, 2002), sometime between 5:40 AM & 5:55 AM, about 15 miiles SE of Nashville Tennessee USA on I-24, I saw a brilliant streak of white light in the sky. It was moving much too fast for an aircraft, & seemed to have a white “tail”. I saw it for an instant, & then it vanished. Low, dense clouds, no rain.
So, was it a meteor?
Meteorite?
And, if so, when do the triffids show up?
With my apologies for the earlier screw-ups in Bad Astronomer’s name. :o
The triffids only show up in the circa 1963 movie with Howard Keel. If you stay with the book, or with the circa 1987 BBC TV adaptation, you know that the triffids have nothing to do with the meteor.
However, you still have the Andromeda Strain, H.G. Wells’ martians, and the Pod People to worry about.
Sounds like a meteor to me. IIRC, it’s only a meteorite if part of it makes it all the way to the ground.
A meteoroid is a rock outside a planet’s atmosphere. A meteor is a rock falling through the atmosphere. A meteorite is the rock after it reaches the surface.
Okay, now I sit back and let the B. A. tell me what’s wrong with what I just wrote.
Yep. A meteor. And it never did become a meteroite if it totally burned up in the atmosphere - that is, if it didn’t land someplace. Call it a meteor. Or shooting star, or falling star. And keep in mind, also, that while the great majority of these things are outer space junk/dust/pebbles, occasionally one is the left-over piece of the world’s space program - otherwise known as space junk. I’m sure there’s a website that tracks a lot of it. Some is too small to track but could still make a nice flash in the sky when it burns up. (examples: someone’s glove, a pair of pliers, a washer, etc.)
You could ask this on the newsgroup “sci.astro.satellites.visual-observe”. If it was a piece of space junk, they might be able tell you or direct you to sites that keep track of when larger pieces are expected to burn up.
Could it have been a meteor that close to the ground? I gather from the OP that it was beneath the low, dense clouds. Low to me means maybe 2000 feet off the ground. I had the impression that meteors usually occur much higher in the atmosphere. How big would one have to be in order for it to still be lighting up at 2000 feet altitude?
A meteor is the flash of light, although the term is sometimes applied to the rock as well. The “meteor” is an atmospheric phenomenon–hence, the term meteorology.
So, what was it?
didn’t we have a thread recently about a meteor that somebody caught (somehow) before it actually hit the ground, so (strictly speaking) it never became a meteorite?
IANAA, but…
It could still have been a bright meteor (or piece of space junk burning up) even though it was visible through - or even possibly below - thick cloud.
I remember a year or two ago, the Leonids were meant to be especially bright, and I went out to see if I could see them. Unfortunately there was thick cloud and a bit of drizzle in the air, but I still saw a few bright trails through the cloud.
Remember that your average “shooting star” is only the size of a grain of sand or small gravel - anything bigger than that will make it much lower down into the atmosphere.
I’d still say it was simply a meteor - from outer space or from inner space. I note that it was observed between 5:30 & 6 in the morning in Tennessee. So it was not very bright yet, I’d imagine. That would make a bright, close meteor easier to see, even through a cloud cover. In fact, I find that “civil twilight” didn’t begin until 6:11 in Nashville and sunrise wasn’t until 6:37, so in such a dark sky, you might have not even seen breaks in the clouds. It could have been way high. Inspector, I think we have our man.
Thank you for the clarification.
By the way, early morning (before twilight) is the best time to see meteors. That’s when you’re on the “front” part of the Earth as it moves through its orbit, so to some degree, the Earth is running into the meteoroids as well as the meteoroids running into the Earth.