See the 2nd-largest meteor explosion in modern history
This week a set of scientists discovered a meteor explosion that occurred in early December, 2018. The event was detected by other instruments soon after taking place, but now we've got our first visual evidence in fire red and orange. This explosive image comes from the Japanese Himawari-8 weather satellite, and was first reported globally on the 15th of March by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Brown reported his findings on the 15th, suggesting that impact occurred at 2350 GMT on the 18th of December. He suggested that the meteor exploded over the Bering Sea in the Pacific Ocean. That's near Alaska and Russia – up and away from any densely-packed human-inhabited region on either land mass.
It's been recorded on "at least" 16 monitoring stations around the world. The meteor was approximately 10 meters in diameter and had a mass of 1400T. The impact in this event made a bang with an energy of 173 kt TNT.
More Dec 18 airburst data from https://t.co/R81dQfvWpZ : object was 10m diameter, mass 1400T and impacted with an energy of 173 kT TNT, roughly 1/3 #Chelyabinsk. Impacts with this energy occur somewhere on Earth every few decades on average. #BeringSeaAirburst @westernu @IMOHQ
— Peter Brown (@pgbrown) March 8, 2019
If we take a peek at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory data for Fireballs Reported by US Government Sensors since 1988, we see only TWO fireballs in the 100kt+ range. As this December meteor explosion rang out with impact energy of 173 kt, it's just about 1/3 the energy of the February 15th, 2013 fireball over Russia. That one was a live video-captured monster.
The force this meteor exerted upon explosion was approximately ten times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Rest in peace all those affected by that bomb and other attacks in wars in the last several decades. Let's hope this never happens again, be it from human-made bombs or attacks from inanimate objects from space.
The imagery we're seeing right now comes from the Japanese Himawari-8 weather satellite courtesy of Simon Proud from the University of Oxford/Japan Meteorological Agency.