Originally posted by chapter29
Do we know if meteors and the green (?) flash/lights go together...?

If a green flash is consistent with meteorite sightings/explosions, then we may be able to narrow it down...

Phage?


grammar edit!

[edit on 11/20/2008 by chapter29]

Green Fireballs is a self-descriptive term used to refer to certain unidentified flying objects which have been sighted in the sky since the late 1940s. Early sightings primarily occurred in the southwestern United States, particularly in New Mexico. [1][2][3] They were once of notable concern to the US government because they were often clustered around sensitive research and military installations, such as Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratory, then Sandia base.[1][2][3] Furthermore, the strange green balls of light appeared suddenly and were reported many times per month near such New Mexico installations, but hardly anywhere else.

The thing plummeting to earth within view of the air traffic control tower at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner "apparently was a meteor, " said Roland Herwig, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration's southwest region.

The energy emitted into the light comes in little packets, called quanta. High-frequency (bluish) light has high energy quanta and low-frequency (reddish) light has lower energy quanta. Temperature measures how much thermal energy is available to go into vibrating particles, etc, including the particles emitting the light. If the typical thermal energy of a particle is large compared to a quantum of light of some color, that color of light is easily emitted. But if the energy quantum is bigger than the typical thermal energy scale, those quanta hardly ever come out. So as you heat something up, first the lower energy (red) quanta show up, then also middle energy (say green), and finally they’re joined by blue quanta.