Meteorite in the skies of New York

On Tuesday, July 16, several people were able to see a flash that crossed the sky at 11:17 am East Coast Time of the United States over New York City. In the end, that object exploded and the roar that caused the explosion could be heard by a large number of Witnesses, according to information from NASA it would be a meteoroid, which is what astronomers call the fragments of comets and asteroids. In the classic definition, these fragments range from the size of a speck of dust to several tens of meters in diameter, although if they exceed 10 meters, it is common to call them asteroids, these objects falling into the atmosphere at high speed they heat up and shine, when they shine they are called meteors, if their brightness exceeds that of the planet Venus, then it is said to be a fireball. There is another category that is not official, but that is also widely used and that is that if their brightness exceeds that of the full moon, then they can be called super bolides, something that usually happens when an object several meters in diameter explodes in the moon. atmosphere and only when some remains of these asteroids and meteoroids reach the ground do we have to talk about a meteorite.

In conclusion, a meteorite is what we pick up from the ground, but not what shines in the sky, nor what is in the cosmos and what shone on the Statue of Liberty seems to have been a fireball and quite powerful, but when it happened During the day there are very few images and you can only see a small glow, which is already something serious because, as I say, it happened during the day and it is important because the sunlight usually dazzles the fall of the racing cars, as you can imagine. The cars do not have a preference for falling during the day or at night, they fall when they have to, but if they fall at night they are spectacular due to the brightness they produce, during the day they can go completely unnoticed; Another important feature in this case is that people could hear the roar of the explosion, something that is not usually common since explosions occur at high altitudes. The NASA team specialized in these issues pointed out that the fireball of the bolide was initially seen entering at high speed, flying at a height of 79 km over Unperbeit, it is estimated that it had a speed of 54,717 km per hour and crossed the sky of New York over the Statue of Liberty and it seems that the car ended up disintegrating at about 47 km high, although this point is still a matter of investigation. The investigation of these events can take time, if enough data is obtained to know the trajectory, the brightness can be analyzed and if possible, a fragment of the ground can be recovered, the history of that meteoroid could then be reconstructed, we have a relatively Recently, on January 21, 2024, a meteoroid exploded near Berlin in Germany, named 2024 BX1, and meteorites could be found from it. Thanks to the analysis, it is known that the space rock came from the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter, some event, perhaps the impact between two large asteroids, caused that piece to leave the asteroid belt, traveling hundreds of millions of kilometers so that in the end it ended up over the skies of Germany.