Meteor

The fireball that streaked across the sky and alarmed numerous Texas residents was likely just a big meteor and not wreckage from colliding satellites, experts said. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig said the fireball seen across a wide stretch of the state Sunday morning probably was a natural phenomenon and not debris from last week's collision between an Iridium communications satellite and a Russian military space vehicle. Preston Starr, observatory manager at the University of North Texas, said it was probably a meteor about the size of a pickup with the consistency of a chunk of concrete.

Charles L. Drake, 72, an emeritus professor at Dartmouth College and a leading advocate of the theory that a volcanic eruption led to the demise of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Drake argued that volcanic eruptions in India spewed lava over 200,000 square miles, releasing chlorine, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide that led to the dinosaurs' extinction.

Newly discovered cliffs on the moon indicate that it has shrunk in the past as it cooled off, and that it might even still be shrinking, researchers say. The shrinkage isn't dramatic — perhaps no more than a 300-foot reduction in the moon's 2,000-mile diameter — but it is enough to cause cracks to form just like they would in the rind of a dried-up orange. Researchers had first noticed the cliffs, technically called lobate scarps because they are semicircular, like a lobe, in images from the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions.

NEW DELHI - Adding to the litany of issues besetting neighboring nuclear rivals China and India, ranging from border disputes to the Dalai Lama to trade deficits, is a new one: UFOs. "Over 100 UFOs seen along China border," said a headline in Tuesday's Times of India. Indian troops guarding the often-tense 2,100-mile border between the two Asian giants say the objects seen in recent months are yellow spheres that appear to lift off from the Chinese side, slowly traversing the sky for three to five hours before disappearing.

As the director of the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics, Carl Agee gets tons of calls, packages and emails from people claiming to have had the rare experience of actually finding a meteorite. Sadly for Agee, most are merely terrestrial rocks, what he calls meteor-wrongs. Then he met 13-year-old Jansen Lyons. Two weeks ago, the teenager walked into the institute - his mother in tow - carrying what he said was a 2-pound hunk of space rock he found at an undisclosed location in the Albuquerque suburb of Rio Rancho.

People throughout the Northeast flooded emergency centers with phone calls Monday evening after seeing bright lights in the sky and hearing loud noises. The likely cause was a meteor shower, authorities said. Sightings were reported from Virginia to New York. "We originally got a report of a plane crash and now it seems there were multiple meteors coming down," said supervisor Tara Dolzani of the Schuylkill County communications center in Pottsville, Pa.

A giant meteor shower bombarded the skies, but telecommunications satellites escaped undamaged from the celestial fireworks. Defense chiefs and communications firms from Britain to Moscow to Luxembourg, which had feared that the satellites' mirrors could be smashed, said their equipment was intact. Israeli astronomers were treated to one of the most spectacular displays of the so-called Leonid meteors, but scientists across northern Europe saw little because of thick clouds.

A layer of rock as thin as a finely honed knife blade has led researchers to conclude that a meteor impact is responsible for a massive global extinction 380 million years ago, similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Brooks B.

Scores of Orange County residents this weekend will be staying up late--staring transfixed into space. The occasion is the annual sky spectacle called the Perseid Meteor Shower. Rapid streaks of light--popularly but incorrectly called "shooting stars"--will be flashing across the evening skies tonight and will continue through early Tuesday morning. "It's a beautiful sight," said Patrick So, an astronomy lecturer at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "It's definitely worth watching."