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News briefs
Ohio event: WCMH-TV Columbus reports today E-mails from a dozen-plus people who “saw a bright flash of light in the sky Sunday night in Central Ohio” at around 11:15 to 11:20pm, and also has video of an eyewitness account. Mount Vernon News has an item today that “Several Knox County residents reported seeing a mysterious blue glow in the sky last night,” and provides one eyewitness account. WXIX-TV Cincinnati told its viewers that “The fireball was left by Halley's comet and was part of a meteor shower that peaked last week. Area residents say they saw a bright light with sparks and a huge flash of blue light followed by smoke.”
WBNS-TV Columbus tells today that “The mysterious blue light was seen flying over Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania,” and has the video of its on-air report. (The photo used for illustration is a sunlit Concorde jet contrail that was famously mistaken for a fireball trail over Wales last October.)
Comment from Marco Langbroek: It is very unlikely that the Ohio fireball was an Orionid, i.e. a meteor from 1P/Halley as was reported by some TV stations. At that time of the night, the radiant is barely up (it is at only some 10 degrees altitude in the east). Orionids are usually faint and don't give many fireballs. Moreover, this fireball has some reports on meteorobs and
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the velocity and directions reported are incompatible with an Orionid. These eyewitnesses describe it as long lasting and slow, while Orionids are very swift. More likely it was either a Taurid associated with comet 2P/Encke (these do give very bright fireballs and are slow!), or a bright sporadic. The directions given by one observer reporting to meteorobs could match a Taurid.
Update: There is an additional news link, at WTAP-TV Parkersburg, West Virginia (but note that this fireball was not re-entering “space debris”).
Meteor news: Yale has a news release today reporting “an innovation for determining the timing and temperatures of ancient impacts that liberate meteorites from extraterrestrial bodies,” and tells of calculating the “helium age” of Bob Verish's “Los Angeles” Mars meteorite to about three million years. This “corresponds with the estimated cosmogenic space exposure age.”
Intruder, not: About a report posted here of an object with temporary designation 4T4D79A that was added to the NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP) at Oct. 25.81 UT and was indicated to be a difficult-to-observe target inside the Earth-Moon system, it was withdrawn from the NEOCP at Oct. 26.19 UT as “does not exist.”
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