NASA: Fireball Sightings are Meteors
Posted on November 3, 2005
The fireball sightings around the world are likely meteors according to a NASA article. David Asher of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland told NASA that people are seeing the Taurid meteor shower.
Most years the shower is weak, producing no more than five rather dim meteors every hour. But occasionally, the Taurids put on quite a show. Fireballs streak across the sky, ruining night vision and interrupting fishing trips.The article also links to this page on the International Meteor Organization's website that shows a Taurid peak falling between Nov. 5th and Nov. 12th so there should be more of the fireball sightings over the next ten days.Asher thinks 2005 could be such a year.
According to Asher, the fireballs come from a swarm of particles bigger than the usual dust grains. "They're about the size of pebbles or small stones," he says. (It may seem unbelievable that a pebble can produce a fireball as bright as the Moon, but remember, these things hit the atmosphere at very high speed.) The rocky swarm moves within the greater Taurid dust stream, sometimes hitting Earth, sometimes not.
"In the early 1990s, when Victor Clube was supervising my PhD work on Taurids," recalls Asher, "we came up with this model of a swarm within the Taurid stream to explain enhanced numbers of bright Taurid meteors being observed in particular years." They listed "swarm years" in a 1993 paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society and predicted an encounter in 2005.