About once every other week for as long as you have been alive, zooming space rocks have penetrated the shell of gases surrounding our blue planet. If you happened to be in the right spot and were looking up, you might have seen a fireball in the sky, caused by a supersonic space rock encountering […]
PAMYULEK – METEOR AKGUA’AQ PAMYULEGMEK TANGELLRIANGA. – THE OTHER NIGHT I SAW A METEOR. A meteor is a piece of space rock that burns as it falls through the Earth’s atmosphere, creating a bright streak in the night sky. The Alutiiq term for meteor—pamyulek—comes from the word pamyuq for tail or handle; something that extends […]
An asteroid, also known as the Chicxulub Impactor, hit Earth some 66 million years ago, causing a crater 180 km wide. The impact of the asteroid heated organic matter in rocks and ejected it into the atmosphere, forming soot in the stratosphere. Soot is a strong, light-absorbing aerosol that caused global climate changes that triggered […]
Japanese astronomers observed the elusive “Phoenicid meteor shower” and have determined that it was spawned by the now vanished Comet Blanpain. They also found that Comet Blanpain was active, though only weakly, in the early 20th Century. This is the first time that researchers could determine the activity of a comet by observing its associated […]
Around 65 million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. The impact and subsequent effects wiped out about 75 percent of all life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs. Scientists studying the resulting Chicxulub crater are learning how large asteroid impacts deform rocks in a way that may produce habitat […]
On February 26 at 1:06 p.m., someone in northern Alaska may have seen a torch of light in the cold daytime sky. On that afternoon, satellites detected a meteoric fireball headed toward Earth. An asteroid six feet in diameter penetrated the atmosphere at 13 miles per second, piercing the protective shell of gases at a […]