The Great Russian Meteor of 2013
Video Credit & Copyright:
RussiaToday
What in heaven's blazes is that?
Thousands of people living near the
Ural Mountains in
Russia saw last Friday morning one of the
more spectacular meteors of modern times streak across the sky.
Forceful sound waves
arrived at the ground minutes later, knocking people over and breaking windows for hundreds of kilometers.
The above video is a compilation of several
car dashcams and includes real time footage of the meteor rampaging,
smoke trails drifting,
shadows quickly shifting, and even the meteor's light reflecting off the back of a bus.
The fireball is thought to have been caused by a
car-sized chunk
of ice and
rock crashing into the Earth's atmosphere.
Since the event was captured from so many angles, the
meteor's trajectory has become determined well enough to indicate from where it came
and to where any resultant pieces might have landed.
It is already certain that this meteor had nothing to do with the several-times larger
asteroid 2012 DA14 which passed the
Earth from a different direction later the same day.
If pieces of the meteor are found,
they might tell
humanity more about the
early Solar System,
when the meteor was likely formed.