Possible Meteor Event over Michigan Bright Lights Loud Booms

It's aliens. Remember the drunk guy that said he was sent back in time to warn us of the impending alien attack in 2018?

www.dailydot.com...

Anyway, I'm from Michigan. Saw it while I was driving home with my fiance and kids on Coon Lake Road between Howell and Pinckney...... It was so bright I had to close my eyes. Glowed multiple colors (primarily Blue and Green) and then gone.

She was able to turn around to see more of it, as she explained was "Bright beautiful colors, followed by fire".

Definitely something to remember for the rest of your life.

And definitely aliens.

USGS confirms meteor over Metro Michigan causes a 2.0 earthquake.

www.clickondetroit.com...

earthquake.usgs.gov...

a reply to: dothedew

I hope the meteor didn't land in the water.

Be great if people found the pieces. A nice souvenier from the universe. And worth money, too.

a reply to: EchoesInTime

There's a video that the wife to be sent me (on my phone); apparently pieces did fall, and something hit this guys garage.

Ended up taking out the whole front half of his garage and destroying his car that was parked in it. Had all of the glass, plastic, rubber, etc., completely melted.

Pretty cool.

I only just now learned that the term 'Meteor' refers to the flash of light as it burns up, rather than the object itself.

Interesting.

originally posted by: SlowNail
Pretty cool.

I only just now learned that the term 'Meteor' refers to the flash of light as it burns up, rather than the object itself.

Interesting.

That is sort of true, but not exactly.

A meteoroid is a piece of rocky/metallic object floating is space. It is smaller than a asteroid.

A meteor is a meteoroid that contacts Earth's atmosphere and leaves a visible trail.
(one could argue, as you mentioned in your post, that the visible trail is what is the meteor -- but that seems to be an argument of semantics :-) )

A meteorite is a meteoroid/meteor (or piece of one) that survives the trip through the atmosphere and lands on the ground.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Thanks for clearing that up. Guess I'll just unlearn that.

I always just thought Meteorites come down and Meteors don't. Never really knew light even came into it.

So, this object would be all 3 as it travelled from space, fast enough to burn visibly, but not fast enough to burn entirely?

a reply to: dothedew

Strange i read earlier that it most likely made it to Lake Michigan.

I'll did again



this Says Mt Clemens CRASH



Another Report

originally posted by: mikell
this Says Mt Clemens CRASH

Another Report

Whoever finds the remains is going to make a NICE buck, those sell for quite a damn bit to collectors for even the smallest, most common compositions.
My younger kid is a major paleontology nerd (her career goal) but you can't be one without being a geology nerd, too. She wants to start buying fossils at shows to add to her rock collection, but she's also very eager to start collecting meteorites, too.

Very cool. I hope you get to see more.

I clearly remember seeing a stunning meteor during the Leonids in 2001, here in Oxfordshire UK. Apart from the Chelyabinsk one and a few others I’m yet to see anything even on TV or social media like the one my friend and I witnessed.

I’d parked my car in the countryside and we watched streak after streak of shooting stars for a good half hour, but then a light startled me and I immediately thought of a car with full beams or tractor with it’s spotlights was coming up the path behind us, such were the shadows cast in front of me. I had time to put down my KitKat, climb out of my car’s boot, walk round to the side if the car, look down the path (no tractor) and only then did I see where the light was coming from. A huge swathe of sky was glowing white/blue like a curved rip which hung there for a good 10 seconds before fading. It was around the length of three hands with tips together at arms length. We were in awe, but I really, really wish I’d seen the original burn up.

There were no reports on the news, no friends saying they’d seen it, no mention at all the next day, because we went accidently the day before the peak was due. That sight stays with me forever. God knows how large it must have been.

a reply to: dothedew

30 years in the future (2048). That means, in 30 years time travel will be a reality!

Time travel, at least in first class, has free drinks to offset that other dizzy feeling of displacement. Only scrubs time travel in coach!

If he is from the future, then there will be an alien invasion this year too! Maybe they already started? That is why the flu is so wide spread this year. Get the population sick, like the end of WWI, and too sick to fight back. A couple disrupters... it would be a cake walk. The easiest way to disperse over a wide area? Explode a "meteor " in the sky in a couple places.

Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Canada,... the first shot across the bow? Look to see how many more "meteors" are seen in next week. And how much more wide spread the flu gets.

originally posted by: SlowNail
a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Thanks for clearing that up. Guess I'll just unlearn that.

I always just thought Meteorites come down and Meteors don't. Never really knew light even came into it.

I honestly don't know if that is technically true, but that seems to be treading near the philosophical idea that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?

Similarly (but a little different), if a space rock somehow makes it through the atmosphere without producing visible trail (whether or not anyone actually witnesses it), is it a meteor? I really don't know the answer.

So, this object would be all 3 as it travelled from space, fast enough to burn visibly, but not fast enough to burn entirely?

My understanding is simply that a meteorite is a piece of space rock that survives to the ground.

originally posted by: dothedew
a reply to: EchoesInTime

There's a video that the wife to be sent me (on my phone); apparently pieces did fall, and something hit this guys garage.

Ended up taking out the whole front half of his garage and destroying his car that was parked in it. Had all of the glass, plastic, rubber, etc., completely melted.

Oddly enough, they do not fall hot. After the detonation, fragments will reach the ground at terminal velocity. A big piece, even at that speed can certainly do damage, but any fire or melting will be a secondary event caused by other factors. Any meteor that is hot on arrival (meteorite), is coming in at or near cosmic velocity. They make craters, and there would be no garage left, let alone a neighborhood.

The meteorite hunters are certainly enroute, and perhaps they will find some pieces. Those that hit property are called hammerstones and are worth big bucks, as well as the rarity of the material. There are so many witnesses, that a strewn field will probably be located, and that is nirvana for these people. The searching could go on for a long time. Very cool.

BTW: The last meteorite to hit a car was the Peekskill event about 25 years ago. It punched in the rear end of a Chevy Malibu Classic sitting in a driveway in Peekskill NY. That car has been on tour around the world, and is presently on display in Paris!

originally posted by: charlyv

originally posted by: dothedew
a reply to: EchoesInTime

There's a video that the wife to be sent me (on my phone); apparently pieces did fall, and something hit this guys garage.

Ended up taking out the whole front half of his garage and destroying his car that was parked in it. Had all of the glass, plastic, rubber, etc., completely melted.

Oddly enough, they do not fall hot. After the detonation, fragments will reach the ground at terminal velocity. A big piece, even at that speed can certainly do damage, but any fire or melting will be a secondary event caused by other factors....

...BTW: The last meteorite to hit a car was the Peekskill event about 25 years ago. It punched in the rear end of a Chevy Malibu Classic sitting in a driveway in Peekskill NY. That car has been on tour around the world, and is presently on display in Paris!

I was lucky enough to witness the famous Peekskill meteor as it flew over my head here in Pennsylvania.

It is famous for, at the time in 1992, being the most filmed meteor fireball to date (16 different videos of it). It occurred on a Friday evening in the fall, so there were many people out watching high school football (American Football) games, and many had their video cameras so they could film their child playing.

These days, people all carry mobile phone cameras with them, plus there are web cams, security cams, and dashboard cams everywhere, so it isn't surprising how many more of these are caught on film today when compared to the past.

Anyway, here is a picture of that car you mentioned in Peekskill, NY that got hit with a piece of the Peekskill meteorite in 1992, and the piece of meteorite next to it. As you pointed out, it damaged the car but did not physically destroy the car. By the time it hit the parked car, the meteorite was probably relatively cool and traveling at terminal velocity of about 165 mph (265 kph):

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Talk about synchronicity... I witnessed it as well from my back porch facing west that night in 1992!!!!
No where near how others saw it. It was a green fireball with a huge tail of sparkling pieces behind it, but way off in the distance. Me and my brothers talk about it all the time, every time something new arrives. How cool.

originally posted by: gort51
Ive seen a few of these over the years.....

I'll see you and raise you 10's of *thousands* (of meteors) over nearly 2 decades of observing. If you mean "fireballs", then it's probably somewhere in the mid-high hundreds.

originally posted by: gort51
I would think they are not meteors though............more like human space junk just falling into the atmosphere. Firstly they are way too slow to be true "Meteors".

You only need to observe a few satellites, and compare them with speeds at which meteors travel across the sky to see that this is not true.

In fact, most natural meteors can be separated into two distinct categories - those of:

Cometary origin - meteors that originate from comets, which themselves originate from the Oourt Cloud.

and

Asteroidal origin - meteors that originate from asteroids, which originate from the asteroid belt.

The distance at which the object in question orbits a body has an enormous influence on how fast the object is traveling. Eg. Since cometary meteoroids originate all the way out at the edge of the solar system (the Oourt Cloud) they have the highest relative velocities when they enter our atmosphere - up to ~72 km/s in the case of Leonid meteors, which is close to the theoretical maximum.

Above this velocity, objects exceed the escape velocity of the system, so they are no longer orbiting our Sun, ie. they have effectively left our solar system and are heading out to interstellar space.

In the case of asteroidal meteors, they originate much further in in the solar system, between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars (where the Main asteroid belt is). This means that their relative velocities are significantly slower than meteors of cometary origin (usually between about 10 km/s - 30 km/s) since their Solar orbits are much smaller.

If we then consider an object in orbit around Earth (a considerably smaller orbit than those I mentioned above), the maximum velocity an object can orbit at before it is no longer in Earth orbit is around 10 Km/s. Whilst there is some overlap between satellites orbiting Earth and the occasional asteroidal object (when they are both orbiting in the same direction and the object has to play "catch up" with Earth, so relative velocity can drop a bit below 10Km/s), most objects of asteroidal are going to be considerably faster - usually at least double the velocity of satellites in orbit around Earth.

You can clearly see there is a significant difference in velocity between an event like we are discussing here and the following footage of an artificial reentry (a CZ-7 Rocket Body which had an orbital velocity of 7.8 Km/s):

Warning: Profanity



As for the event in question, while it can be hard to get a feel for the true velocity of a meteor by viewing footage of it, to me this looks like a fairly typical (but probably at the fast end of the spectrum) asteroidal object entering the atmosphere. Also, strong booms and the fact that it appears to have registered on a seismic monitoring system suggest an asteroidal origin, since asteroidal material tends to be denser/stronger than cometary material, it tends to (with a large enough object) make it lower down in the atmosphere, where the air is thick enough that a sonic boom has a medium to propagate in. Cometary material on the other hand tends to disintegrate long before it gets to below around 50 Km altitude, which is about the cutoff for sonic booms to be heard/felt on the ground.

originally posted by: gort51
They also seem too big,

Why wouldn't objects that can be much larger/heavier/faster than our puny little satellites seem bigger/brighter when they enter the atmosphere? With significantly more kinetic energy involved, you would expect a small asteroid to be much "bigger" than a slow moving "tin can"!

Continued in the following post...

originally posted by: gort51
and give a green glow, which indicate copper.....a very human type metal, for electrical components etc.

There is no reason to think copper had anything to do with this. Copper is not generally found in significant quantities in meteorites or present in meteor spectra at a significant intensity compared to other spectral emissions.

Meteor physics 101:

The light we see that is generated by a meteoroid entering the atmosphere is produced by molecules (both from the atmosphere and ablated from the the meteoroid surface itself) being ionized. These ionized molecules form a light emitting "cloud" of plasma around the meteoroid, which is what we see when we see a meteor.

The key point I want to make here, is that most of this ionized light emitting plasma is actually composed of ions that come not from the meteoroid, but from the atmosphere, thus, in many cases, the light you are seeing is showing us what is in the atmosphere.

The chemical composition of the radiating gas varied along the fireball path and does not reflect the chemical composition of the meteoroid itself. The refractory elements (Al, Ca, Ti) are underabundant in the gas. The material was ablated by melting in liquid phase and then evaporated in surrounding hot gas, but the refractory (low melting) elements were evaporated incompletely or too late. About 95% of the hot gas around the meteoroid were formed by the air.

Source: A fireball spectrum analysis abstract

Since nitrogen (red emission) and oxygen (green emission) dominate our atmosphere, it tends to be those colours that we see in meteors, but they are most evident in faster meteors (above 50 Km/s), and so in a slower meteor like this one probably was, emissions from ionized meteoroid material may start to become evident. Obviously, spectral lines from the material of the meteoroid itself are detectable (albeit overwhelmed by the light from ionized atmospheric gasses) in meteor spectra, and if memory serves it's often Ca which is responsible for much of the green emission in slower meteors.

Further reading on the subject:
The Auroral Green Line in a Leonid Spectrum
The photographed colours of Leonid meteors
Meteor Ionization and its Dependence on Velocity
Meteor-Trail Ionization Theory. IV. Ionization Efficiency through Collision of Vaporized Meteoroid Particles with Air Molecules

originally posted by: gort51
Most true meteors are much faster than these pieces of junk, and flash across the skys in milliseconds.

As previously explained by another member here, this is because most visually observed meteors are caused by very small particles, on the order of size of sand grains. This means they ablate/disintegrate very quickly. As size increases, so does how long they last, how bright they get, and how uncommon they are.

originally posted by: gort51
Supposedly, NORAD or some other agencies track these pieces of space junk....Im sure they would have known about this one......particularly over the USA.

Yes, all large junk is carefully tracked, which is one of the reasons we know that this event was not a re-entry.

originally posted by: gort51
I would think the same with the ones shown over Russia as well.

There are 10,000+ pieces of space junk circling our planet.....all Human made.

Yes you are correct that there are 10,000+ pieces of space junk circling our planet, however, most of that is small (less than 3 or 4 cm), and in-capable of the type of event we are discussing here. It does however probably account for many of the "flashes" in the sky being talked about elsewhere on this forum as if it were still a mystery, despite me having carefully demonstrated how to accurately identify them years ago!

It would take a rather large artificial object to create sonic booms, and they are all carefully tracked, as you say, which leaves us with one highly likely possibility: The event was caused by either a slow cometary fragment, or more likely, a small asteroid.

originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People

A meteor is a meteoroid that contacts Earth's atmosphere and leaves a visible trail.
(one could argue, as you mentioned in your post, that the visible trail is what is the meteor -- but that seems to be an argument of semantics :-) )

A better definition of "meteor" IMHO is: The light we see produced when an object/meteoroid enters the atmosphere at hyper-velocity.

Since we can not see the object/meteoroid itself.

originally posted by: firesnake

I clearly remember seeing a stunning meteor during the Leonids in 2001, here in Oxfordshire UK. Apart from the Chelyabinsk one and a few others I’m yet to see anything even on TV or social media like the one my friend and I witnessed.

I’d parked my car in the countryside and we watched streak after streak of shooting stars for a good half hour, but then a light startled me and I immediately thought of a car with full beams or tractor with it’s spotlights was coming up the path behind us, such were the shadows cast in front of me. I had time to put down my KitKat, climb out of my car’s boot, walk round to the side if the car, look down the path (no tractor) and only then did I see where the light was coming from. A huge swathe of sky was glowing white/blue like a curved rip which hung there for a good 10 seconds before fading. It was around the length of three hands with tips together at arms length. We were in awe, but I really, really wish I’d seen the original burn up.


There were no reports on the news, no friends saying they’d seen it, no mention at all the next day, because we went accidently the day before the peak was due. That sight stays with me forever. God knows how large it must have been.

Are you sure you are not thinking of the 1998 Leonids which was the year almost everyone was caught off guard? If so, then chances are I also saw that fireball. I was seeing fireballs at the rate of 1-2 per minute (a "half-storm"... of fireballs technically!) that night, constantly for over 7 hours, between ~midnight and 07:00, even while the Sun was begging to rise and there were no more stars visible! Many of them illuminated the ground like it was almost daylight, and left long persistent trains as you describe. Some I recall lasted 10+ minutes easily, which is impressive considering I was living in suburban London at the time!

It was actually 2001 that the timings were well pinned down, and many (including myself) traveled to the Southern hemisphere to observe the Leonids. The peaks were predicted to occur during daylight in the UK in 2001 unfortunately. After 1998 caught (almost) everyone off guard, there were many eyes and cameras watching in the days around the predicted peak that year, so it's unlikely anything significant got by unnoticed. Your account makes a lot more sense if it was in fact in 98 that it took place.

98 was a life changing experience for me in so many ways. I would not be a photographer/astronomer, and I probably would not have come across ATS, which means I would probably not have met my dear wife, and I probably wouldn't have observed a full blown storm of Leonids in 2001 from arguably one of the most dramatic and ideal settings, the Australian outback! In short, I would not be the person I am today had I not happened to look out of my window a night "too early".

Anyway, your tale is a good lesson why you should always try to observe meteor showers for at least a night either side of the predicted peak, although these days such things are much less likely to be overlooked when it comes to major showers at least.

Thanks for sharing

originally posted by: dothedew
a reply to: EchoesInTime

There's a video that the wife to be sent me (on my phone); apparently pieces did fall, and something hit this guys garage.

Ended up taking out the whole front half of his garage and destroying his car that was parked in it. Had all of the glass, plastic, rubber, etc., completely melted.

Do you find the official Taylor, Mi. police description of what happened to this guy's pickup truck, to be a bit strange?
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