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Monday morning fireball was a comet fragment burning up in Earth’s atmosphere
Western Canadians caught a glimpse of a bright flash overhead this week as a fireball lit up the sky on Monday morning. Now, University of Alberta researchers have used Western Canada’s most advanced fireball network to capture images and trajectory of the fireball—revealing it to be a small piece of a comet that burned up in the atmosphere.
“Using two observation sites, we were able to calculate both its trajectory and velocity, which tell us about the origin of the meteor and reveal that it was a piece of a comet,” said Patrick Hill, post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “This chunk was largely made of dust and ice, burning up immediately without leaving anything to find on the ground—but instead giving us a spectacular flash.”