Huge meteor explosion over Earth last year went unnoticed until now

A meteor caused a massive explosion over Earth last year, but nobody noticed until now. It is the second-largest recorded impact in the past century, after the meteor that exploded over the Russian region of Chelyabinsk in 2013. The giant fireball hit at 2350 GMT on 18 December over the Bering Sea, a part of the Pacific Ocean between Russia and Alaska.

Huge meteor explosion over Earth last year went unnoticed until now

There is not any more information at the link unless you subscribe to New Scientist. There is the name of a professor at the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Peter Brown.

He is a member of the Western Meteor Physics Group. A web search brings up his web pages, but I could not find any other information about this huge meteor explosion. There may be a free news story about it in the near future.

Neat-o, happened on my birthdate.
It worries me that it's taken this long to notice it. We really need to step up our Planetary Defense.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

Was a G1 watch March 14/15, 2018, and the northern lights were particularly unusual; you could see them in the midwestern united states.


ETA: Nvm. I assumed exactly 1 year ago and recalled the northern lights being weird.

i wonder how many realy did see it as in that area crab season is on and a lot of crab boats should have been out

We're all still here talking about it so it obviously wasn't huge enough.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

I'm sure NASA would have been aware of this. Considering the International Space Station would have easily detected or viewed the explosion. Why would they have kept this information from the public? Unless there are more possible meteors that are on a trajectory course toward earth.

The other question I have, does the U.S. have some secret weapon that can destroy large meteors before they enter into our atmosphere? Again, I would be surprised if NASA couldn't detect this meteor being so close to the earth.

I would also think there would have been a number of small fire balls entering the atmosphere after the explosion that would have been detected not only by NASA but by meteorologists and astronomers.

I wonder why is it a premium article. Such data should be freely available.

[Edit] Some info via Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org...
2018, Dec 18 | over the Bering Sea | 56.9°N 172.4°E | 173 kilotonnes of TNT (720 TJ) | 25.6km | Asteroid ~10 meters in diameter. Largest airburst since Chelyabinsk.

JPL data: cneos.jpl.nasa.gov...

Location:



Hmm, why would they not know about this impact for a whole year? USA has a global monitoring system for detecting spacecraft reentry, ICBMs and nuclear tests.

a reply to: WeRpeons

...Considering the International Space Station would have easily detected or viewed the explosion.

Unless perhaps the ISS was on the opposite side of the Earth.

Stuff like this is both intriguing and scary, we could all be wiped out in an instant and be non-the-wiser.

originally posted by: wildespace
I wonder why is it a premium article. Such data should be freely available.

[Edit] Some info via Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org...
2018, Dec 18 | over the Bering Sea | 56.9°N 172.4°E | 173 kilotonnes of TNT (720 TJ) | 25.6km | Asteroid ~10 meters in diameter. Largest airburst since Chelyabinsk.

JPL data: cneos.jpl.nasa.gov...

Location:

Hmm, why would they not know about this impact for a whole year? USA has a global monitoring system for detecting spacecraft reentry, ICBMs and nuclear tests.

Good find wildespace. Having you questioning this instead of debunking it has me even more curious about it

Another strange thing about this is it showed up on Drudge in the morning and when I went to post it last night it was gone. I had to do a search to hunt it down.

There is no way an explosion this big was not detected by the military and NASA.

2018, Dec 18[7] over the Bering Sea 56.9°N 172.4°E 173 kilotonnes of TNT (720 TJ) 25.6km Asteroid ~10 meters in diameter.
Largest airburst since Chelyabinsk.

It is listed
en.wikipedia.org...

I found another source, maybe with the same text:

www.siouxfallsscientists.com...

Thanks ArMaP, there is a lot of info in your link.

The meteor was 10 metres in diameter, had a mass of 1400 tonnes and impacted with an energy of 173 kilotons of TNT, he wrote on Twitter. The impact energy was about 10 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

So I guess it didn't go unnoticed until now so why the title I wonder and why no mention of it before now.

The explosion was detected by infrasound stations around the world, which pick up low-frequency acoustic waves inaudible to humans. These stations were initially set up during the cold war to detect nuclear explosions. It is the third-largest impact in modern times, after Chelyabinsk and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908.

www.siouxfallsscientists.com...

a reply to: SeaWorthy

There is also this in the link from ArMaP.

Triangulating the location and source of an explosion requires combining pressure wave data from multiple monitoring stations, which may explain the delay in the data being made public.

But this confirms that the US government likely knew about it but kept it quite.

The Bering Sea explosion was also picked up by US government monitors that detect fireballs: their sensors pick up electromagnetic radiation in the form of infrared and visible light.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

their sensors pick up electromagnetic radiation in the form of infrared and visible light.

Heh. Sort of redundant but it does sound sciencey.

That's talking about this, it's no so much that it was "kept quiet" just that it does take some data processing to make sense of it.
www.foxnews.com...

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: LookingAtMars

That's talking about this, it's no so much that it was "kept quiet" just that it does take some data processing to make sense of it.
www.foxnews.com...

Yea, you would need a supercomputer to have the information in a timely manner...

Thanks for the link Phage

a reply to: LookingAtMars

For what it's worth, here's JPLs fireball data.

cneos.jpl.nasa.gov...

a reply to: Phage

Here is the map at your link filtered to show only the strongest impact energy. I bet these were flagged in almost real time by the military system that uses these sensors.




The one on the left of the map, over the Bering Sea is the meteor talked about in the OP. The one on the right is the Chelyabinsk meteor. It looks like the Bering Sea meteor was going almost twice as fast as the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Cool and terrifying as per usual.

But totally coincidental or I'm mistaken, I'm sure, but remember that airline pilot who posted here that he saw and photographed weird underwater lights when traversing the Pacific a few years ago? Wasn't the location very near the meteors?

Dunno, maybe someone bombed an underwater installation or something, or the lights somehow act as a meteor attractor... heh, just trying to put some paraspin on the story.

There does not seem to be any trajectory data, which would be important to backtrack orbital sources. The latitudes of all of the past big events like this (Tunguska, Chelyabinsk and this one) are very similar. Science might say coincidental, but it is strange.