Astronomy, Meteor | featured news

Private group works to prevent next close encounter with an asteroid or meteors. The Earth may have survived its close encounters with an asteroid and a meteor Friday, but the episodes focused new attention on gaps in astronomers' ability to identify smaller space rocks like these capable of inflicting widespread destruction.

A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb Friday, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring nearly 1,000 people. The spectacle deeply frightened many Russians, with some elderly women declaring that the world was coming to an end. Many of the injured were cut by flying glass as they flocked to windows to see what the source was for such an intense flash of light.

Russian officials say a meteorite has fallen in the Chelyabinsk region some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow.

The Leonid meteor shower this weekend will be less dramatic than some years, but it will still put on a good show.

A chunk of meteorite struck the house of a San Francisco Bay Area resident, landing in her backyard, after a meteor streaked through the sky on Wednesday evening.

Northwest Louisiana authorities are investigating the source of whatever shook people's residences and businesses about 11:40 p.m. Monday. The Webster sheriff's office now is entertaining the possibility that it may have been a meteorite, possibly in the Dixie Inn area. There have been a large number of reports stating that they saw something come down instead of something blow up, a spokesman said.

The annual Perseid meteor shower will begin Saturday, with the peak occurring in the early hours of Sunday morning local time. The number of visible meteors is generally lower than during December's Geminid meteor shower, but the Perseids are frequently more observed because they occur during warmer weather and in a vacation month.

A sonic boom heard in California last week had an out-of-this world origin as ”a large meteoric event” according to NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. Scientists now estimate the blast measured in near 5 kilotons or roughly 1/3 the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, estimates the object was about the size of a minivan, weighed in at around 154,300 pounds.

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July. This is only the fifth time scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The small rock refugees were seen in a fireball in the sky six months ago, but they weren't discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.

The night sky will put on a show in the coming days – and you don't need a telescope to appreciate it, according to University of Virginia astronomer Ed Murphy. The annual Perseid Meteor Shower, which typically produces 50 to 60 ...