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By Steve Igo
April 17, 2009
WISE — A cosmic visitor created a
brief spectacle over the pre-dawn Wise
County skies Friday.
Most likely a meteor plummeting to
earth in a blaze of glory, the fireball streaked down on an easterly arc
roughly above U.S. Route 58 down toward what appeared to be a destination in
the Tacoma
area, at least from the perspective of White Oak Road atop the Tacoma Mountain Road
ridgeline, looking south.
The fiery falling object was
witnessed shortly before 6:30 a.m., or roughly a half-hour before sunrise.
Daybreak motorists on U.S. 58 would have had a nice view of an unusual event
during their morning commute, the fireball breaking apart into two pieces
before flaming out in the same instant at what appeared to be just a few
hundred feet above the terrain.
The Wise County Sheriff’s Dispatch Center said no citizens reported having
their breakfast rudely interrupted by a smoldering stone smashing through a
ceiling or finding a car windshield inexplicably spiderwebbed. So whatever was
left of the likely meteor — tiny pieces or even tinier particles for the most
part — splattered harmlessly onto field or forest.
Dr. Lucian Undrieu, a native of Romania and a professor of physics at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, said a
meteor is an object that disintegrates in the atmosphere, and a meteorite
actually strikes the ground. Because it flamed out, the object was most likely
a meteor, he said.
“There are probably two (meteorites)
per day all over the globe,” Undrieu said.
A little-known fact is that the
Earth’s mass grows by an estimated 40,000 tons annually from stuff that falls
from space.
Undrieu said for a meteor to have
survived so close to the ground, it would have been about one meter in diameter
when entering the atmosphere, or more or less a yard thick.
Breaking into two pieces an instant
before flaming out was likely the final incineration of Friday’s meteor,
Undrieu said, so little more than stardust would have sprinkled onto the
ground. Also, appearing to fall over the Tacoma area would have been deceiving
to the White Oak Road witness, he said, because the object could have been far
farther south.
Although he teaches physics, Undrieu
said he occasionally teaches an introductory astronomy course at UVa-Wise.
“I take great pleasure in teaching it,” he said, and
expressed a hint of envy for those early birds who might have witnessed
Friday’s sky spectacle of a meteoroidal kind.
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