Daily Archives: 25-April-2016

Quick Look at Recent Meteor Events

I filter my news feed for anything related to astronomy, and I have been seeing a number of articles recently about large meteor explosions (called fireballs or bolides) in the atmosphere (example, example). These events are not occurring more frequently than before – we now have the technology to discover these explosions. The recent spate of bolide burst reports has caused me to become curious about how frequently these impacts are occurring. It turns out that NASA has an excellent set of web pages on this topic. There have been quite a few large meteor explosions, with the largest being the Chelyabinsk burst in 2013. As you can see in Figure 1, the cataloged meteor events are fairly even spread across the Earth. Continue reading

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