Meteor

Imagine you're driving to work one day when a blazing meteor streaks across the horizon and explodes into a fireball. You'd be pretty shocked, and might even blurt out an expletive or two, right? That's what most of us, including Jon Stewart, would assume. But apparently that's not the case in Russia, where a 10,000-ton space rock lit up the sky last week , injuring hundreds and releasing as much energy as 30 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs -- or, as the locals call it, "Friday.

Pull out the reclining lawn chairs and get yourself to the darkest area you can find: The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is peaking this weekend, and if you get lucky, you can catch up to 30 "shooting stars" per hour. You may also want to set your alarm clock: Sky watchers say the best time to catch the light show is in the hour or two just before dawn on Sunday. Here in Southern California that means you'll want to start your meteor hunting around 4 a.m. The Eta Aquarid meteor shower occurs each year in late April or early May when the Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left in the wake of Halley's Comet.

Colombian scientists have reconstructed the interplanetary path of a meteor that flamed across the Russian skyline this month and smashed into the countryside, leaving hundreds of people injured. The meteor, estimated to be about 45 feet across and weighing 10,000 tons, was flung toward Earth as it orbited around the sun. It wasn't a declaration of war by bugs on Klendathu after all. Apparently, it was just a matter of time before it hit, researchers concluded in a study published this week on ArXiv.org.

Hey there, tenacious sky watchers: Forecasters say the Lyrid meteor shower will peak late Sunday night and into Monday morning, so set your alarm clocks and gather your blankets. You've got a show to watch. The Lyrid meteor shower takes place each April as our planet passes through debris left by the tail of the Comet Thatcher. The meteors are actually little bits of that debris, often no larger than a grain of sand, that burn up in  Earth's atmosphere, causing light to streak across the sky.  Photos: Amazing images from space The Lyrid meteor shower was first recorded more than 2,000 years ago by Chinese astronomers who wrote that "stars fell like rain," according to Sky and Telescope .  These days, however, the Lyrids are decidedly less dramatic.

MOSCOW -- In the wake of what many now humorously call “the alien bombardment” of the Russian industrial Urals, divers Saturday finished their initial inspection of a lake 60 miles west of Chelyabinsk but found no traces of the space object that exploded Friday morning over the region, Interfax reported. A big chunk of it is believed to have fallen into Chebarkul Lake, breaking the thick ice. What experts agree was a meteor or a small asteroid wreaked havoc in the densely populated and highly industrialized Urals, injuring hundreds, causing millions of dollars' worth of material damage, disrupting phone and Internet communications and prompting residents and leading scientists to draw new lessons from the small Chelyabinsk Armageddon.

MOSCOW -- Russian scientists declared Monday that they have found and established the composition of pieces of the meteor that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region last week, injuring hundreds of people and causing millions of dollars worth of damage. Over the weekend, 53 tiny pieces of dark porous material were collected near Chebarkul Lake, 60 miles west of Chelyabinsk, the regional center, officials said. The biggest of the finds was 7 millimeters long. The samples were without doubt meteorites, Viktor Grokhovsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences meteorite committee, said early Monday.

MOSCOW -- A meteor streaked over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday morning, producing a blast that injured hundreds, caused minor damage to buildings and temporarily disrupted Internet communication, officials said. Yelena Smirnykh, deputy information chief of the Emergency Situations Ministry said 474 people sought medical assistance after the explosion. "Five of them were hospitalized, most of the injuries being cuts by shattered window glass," she said. [Updated, 7:41 a.m. Feb. 15: Later in the day, Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Puchkov reported to President Vladimir Putin in televised remarks that more than 500 people were injured, with 112 of them -- including 80 children --  requiring hospital care.

The rare event described in the poem 'Year of Meteors (1859-1860)' is indeed called a 'meteor procession.' It takes place when a grazer meteor breaks up and the pieces travel together as if in formation. Scholars have for decades tried to identify a puzzling celestial event in one of Walt Whitman's poems from his collection "Leaves of Grass." Now they've done so — using clues from a famed American landscape painter. In the July issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, a team that includes astronomers and a literary scholar, all from Texas State University, details the existence and nature of the rare event, in which meteor fragments crossed the sky in stately, synchronized fashion.

Pull out the reclining lawn chairs and get yourself to the darkest area you can find: The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is peaking this weekend, and if you get lucky, you can catch up to 30 "shooting stars" per hour. You may also want to set your alarm clock: Sky watchers say the best time to catch the light show is in the hour or two just before dawn on Sunday. Here in Southern California that means you'll want to start your meteor hunting around 4 a.m. The Eta Aquarid meteor shower occurs each year in late April or early May when the Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left in the wake of Halley's Comet.

A meteor exploded in the skies above Russia's Urals region, sending a shock wave that shattered windows, hurting about 100 people. The meteor disintegrated above Chelyabinsk at about 7:25 a.m. Moscow time, the Emergencies Ministry's division in the Urals district said today on its website. Burning streaks lit up the sky, caught by drivers on dashboard cameras and posted on YouTube. “A serious meteor fell,” billionaire Sergey Galitskiy, chief executive officer of OAO Magnit, Russia's biggest food retailer by value, said in a post on his Twitter Inc. account.

What will you be doing at 9 p.m. Wednesday night? If you were fascinated by the meteor that streaked across the Russian sky last month -- briefly outshining the sun -- then you should plan to watch "Nova" on PBS.  Wednesday's episode of the excellent science documentary series is devoted to the bizarre case of what's come to be known as the Chelyabinsk meteor (named for the Siberian city it passed over).  For those who need a brief refresher course, this huge space rock originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and somehow wound up orbiting the sun in a trajectory that put it on a collision course with Earth.

A large meteor lit up the night sky across the East Coast, leading hundreds of dazzled spectators to report sightings in more than a dozen states. The event was not unusual but was widely reported because it happened across a populated area on a Friday night, said Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office. “There was a lot of people out and it got everyone's attention,” Cooke told the Los Angeles Times. The meteor was reported at about 8 p.m. EDT. It was probably the size of a boulder, about one yard across, and was bright enough to be classified as a fireball, Cooke said.

Colombian scientists have reconstructed the interplanetary path of a meteor that flamed across the Russian skyline this month and smashed into the countryside, leaving hundreds of people injured. The meteor, estimated to be about 45 feet across and weighing 10,000 tons, was flung toward Earth as it orbited around the sun. It wasn't a declaration of war by bugs on Klendathu after all. Apparently, it was just a matter of time before it hit, researchers concluded in a study published this week on ArXiv.org.

If you thought that asteroid that scorched through the Russian sky last week was something out of the ordinary, think again. An interactive map that's going viral shows the location, size, and chemical makeup of every asteroid and meteor that has slammed into the Earth since 2,300 BC. If only we had dashboard cameras back then to capture the very first one! The map was created by Javier de la Torre, a blogger in New York and cofounder of mapping company CartoDB.

Imagine you're driving to work one day when a blazing meteor streaks across the horizon and explodes into a fireball. You'd be pretty shocked, and might even blurt out an expletive or two, right? That's what most of us, including Jon Stewart, would assume. But apparently that's not the case in Russia, where a 10,000-ton space rock lit up the sky last week , injuring hundreds and releasing as much energy as 30 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs -- or, as the locals call it, "Friday.

The sky is falling! Florida residents reported seeing a flickering light falling off the state's eastern coast Sunday night, raising curiosity over whether Earth has played host to yet another meteor. Crowdsourced reports on the American Meteor Society's website generally stated the falling light happened sometime after 6:30 p.m. local time, with sightings from Cocoa, Fla., all the way down to Miami. NBC-6 in Miami showed witness video of a falling, flickering light, burning brighter and moving slower than most small shooting stars.

It took a rock from space to derail the viral supremacy of the "Harlem Shake," but that's exactly what Friday's Russian meteor has accomplished. According to Visible Measures , a video analytics and advertising firm, videos of the Russian meteor amassed more than 7.7 million views in less than 15 hours. And, of course, people have wasted no time posting videos and memes. A few people tried combining the meteor with the "Harlem Shake. " Most are pretty bad, but one combined the song with a pretty good roundup of meteor videos.

What will you be doing at 9 p.m. Wednesday night? If you were fascinated by the meteor that streaked across the Russian sky last month -- briefly outshining the sun -- then you should plan to watch "Nova" on PBS.  Wednesday's episode of the excellent science documentary series is devoted to the bizarre case of what's come to be known as the Chelyabinsk meteor (named for the Siberian city it passed over).  For those who need a brief refresher course, this huge space rock originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and somehow wound up orbiting the sun in a trajectory that put it on a collision course with Earth.

MOSCOW -- Russian scientists declared Monday that they have found and established the composition of pieces of the meteor that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region last week, injuring hundreds of people and causing millions of dollars worth of damage. Over the weekend, 53 tiny pieces of dark porous material were collected near Chebarkul Lake, 60 miles west of Chelyabinsk, the regional center, officials said. The biggest of the finds was 7 millimeters long. The samples were without doubt meteorites, Viktor Grokhovsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences meteorite committee, said early Monday.

The 10-ton meteor that streaked into Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 mph and exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk was a reminder that the universe is not such a hospitable place. Still, though hundreds of people were injured and thousands of windows were shattered, no one died and repairs can be made. By comparison, the terrestrial havoc wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States was far more devastating.  In the movies, when humanity is faced with imminent doom, whether from a massive asteroid or an invasion of space monsters, the people of the world forget their differences, band together and save themselves.