Friday, January 24th 2020, 12:30 pm – Did you see this fireball?
At just before 9 p.m., on the night of Tuesday, January 21, 2020, southern Ontario had an unexpected visitor – a hunk of rock from space that blazed through the sky as a meteor fireball.
The meteor, which flashed overhead just to the north of Goderich, ON, was spotted from hundreds of kilometres around. The American Meteor Society received over 30 reports from various locations around southern Ontario and southern Michigan, and as far away as Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Rochester, New York, and Columbus, Ohio.
This map shows the concentration of reports for this meteor fireball, as well as the likely start, end and trajectory of its passage through the atmosphere. Credit: American Meteor Society
According to Dr. Peter Brown, from the University of Western Ontario’s Meteor Group, the meteoroid that caused this fireball was likely the size of a softball, so perhaps 10 centimetres wide, with a mass of up to 10 kilograms, and it was travelling at around 15 kilometres per second (54,000 km/h).
Yet another capture of the Kintail fireball, this time with an experimental meteor camera system near Tavistock, ON based on https://t.co/JMV1A8Nciu @westernu @IMOmeteors @amsmeteors #fireball #toomanymeteorcameras https://t.co/ZVtQ3aOqd0
As Brown posted to Twitter, the fireball flared to life roughly 80 kilometres above the ground, starting about 50 kilometres east of Goderich, and it winked out around 30 kilometres above the ground, somewhere over the waters of Lake Huron, west of Kintail.
From the path it took during its steep plunge through the atmosphere, Brown was able to trace the meteoroid back to its origin in the asteroid belt, beyond Mars.
Kintail fireball orbit from last night place origins firmly from the asteroid belt. The initial mass was somewhere between a few to ten kilograms – softball sized. Not quite as bright as the full moon. @WesternU @amsmeteors 3/3
Given the speed of this meteoroid and the height where the fireball ended, Brown said that small meteorites may have landed from this event. Unfortunately, since the end point of the fireball was over the water, any meteorites that did reach the surface are now likely lying at the bottom of Lake Huron.
