INDONESIAN ASTEROID: Picture this: A 10-meter wide asteroid hits Earth and explodes in the atmosphere with the energy of a small atomic bomb. Frightened by thunderous sounds and shaking walls, people rush out of their homes, thinking that an earthquake is in progress. All they see is a twisting trail of debris in the mid-day sky:

This really happened on Oct. 8th around 11 am local time in the coastal town of Bone, Indonesia. The Earth-shaking blast received remarkably little coverage in Western press, but meteor scientists have given it their full attention. "The explosion triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) more than 10,000 km away," report researchers Elizabeth Silber and Peter Brown of the Univ. of Western Ontario in an Oct. 19th press release. Their analysis of the infrasound data revealed an explosion at coordinates 4.5S, 120E (close to Bone) with a yield of about 50 kton of TNT. That's two to three times more powerful than World War II-era atomic bombs.

Originally posted by Snarf
reply to post by highlander08

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I'm watching it, but perhaps not close enough?

I see the "zig zag" pattern to the smoke, but i don't see anything fly off.

Originally posted by highlander08
I suggest you all watch the news footage above very carefully. Base of the smoke trail at 0.37 seconds. This isn't footage of a smoke trail left by a meteor, it's something still on fire in the air.....

I would have to strongly disagree with that.

This looks just like a trail left by a meteor IMHO.

this footage appears to show something emerging from the base or source of the smoke trail and then shooting off to the right.

I agree - probably a bird, or just a glitch in the video

Why is the smoke thick at the end of the trail, it doesn't just fade and why is the trail not straight.

The smoke is thick there, because different parts of the trail are dispersed at different rates, depending on the upper atmosphere winds.

The trail would have started off straight, but after just a few seconds it would start to zig-zag and distort due to high altitude winds. The atmosphere is layered a bit like an onion, and the directions and speeds of winds in each layer is different. When a meteor penetrates these layers, the trail left by the meteor is ripped apart by these high altitude winds in a very short period of time.

Here is a sequence of images that shows the process in action:

Source:

It seems to show something still there, and burning in the air, which is then backed up by the emergence of "something" from the plume.

... Saturday, September 19, 2009 7:20:48 PM by gleeaikin===

Another significant boloid event apparently occurred on or around August 13, 1930. This would have coincided with the passage of the Perseid Meteor Showers. While it was not as big as Tungusku, it still shook up this sparsely settled area of Brazil==

www.google.com...=en&num=100&newwindow=1&q=Asteroid+event+in+Brazil%2C+1930s&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

..In 1994 the US Department of Defense made public domain its records on energetic bolide-type asteroids over a time span of about twenty years. This data indicates that, from 1975 to 1992, there were 136 airbursts of energy greater than 1 kiloton, but the real number was probably at least 10 times higher, because the satellite system does not cover the entire surface of the Earth..

Analysis of its appearance and trajectory showed it was a meteoroid about 3 metres (9.8 ft) (if a carbonaceous chondrite) to 14 metres (46 ft) (if made of cometary ices) in diameter in the Apollo asteroid class in an Earth-crossing orbit that would make a subsequent close approach to Earth in August 1997. In 1994, Czech astronomer Zdenek Ceplecha re-analysed the data and suggested the passage would have reduced the meteoroid's mass to about a third or half of its original mass (reducing its diameter to 2 to 10 metres).

The meteoroid's 100 second passage through the atmosphere reduced its velocity by about 800 metres per second (2,600 ft/s) and the whole encounter significantly changed its orbital inclination from 15 degrees to 8 degrees.