LONDON, ON – It’s a bird, it’s plane, it’s a burning piece of space rock?
The people of Cardiff, a small town within Highlands East are being asked to go on a scavenger hunt of sorts after Western University’s All-Sky camera caught a glimpse of a falling meteorite.
According to the university, around 2:24 am Wednesday morning the camera network, which runs in collaboration with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, showed a meteorite as bright as a full moon streaking across the skies.
The university says that the initial analysis done by NASA’s Steven Ehlert shows that fragments of the meteorite fell near Bancroft.
Astronomy Professor, Peter Brown, specializes in meteors and he confirmed that all 10 of the All-sky cameras caught the event, including the cameras as far away as Montreal, Quebec.
“This fireball likely dropped a small number of meteorites in the Bancroft area, specifically near the small town of Cardiff. We suspect meteorites made it to the ground because the fireball ended very low in the atmosphere just to the west of Bancroft and slowed down significantly. This is a good indicator that material survived,” says Brown.
The press release sent out by the university suggests that this event is important to researchers because it gives them good-quality footage to review and hopefully learn where it originated from in our solar system.
Preliminary research shows that it first became visible roughly above Lake Ontario in Oshawa with an altitude of 93KM. After that, it passed through Clarington and just west of Peterborough before burning out west of Bancroft.
The university believes the meteorite was the size of a beach ball and likely dropped thousands of gram sized pieces all over Cardiff