Bolides are a type of meteor: meteors with a brightness above magnitude -4. According to the American Meteor Society (AMA), this is about the same brightness as the planet Venus.
Bolides differ from regular meteors in that they explode after entering the Earth’s atmosphere, like the meteor captured in Matthew Dominick’s video.
When a meteor enters the Earth’s atmosphere, friction causes it to simultaneously slow down and heat up. Then a shock wave is formed. bow shock).
The shock wave heats and compresses the atmospheric gas in front of the meteor, and some of this energy is radiated back into the meteor. This causes the meteor to erode and eventually disintegrate.
As a result of the breakup, the amount of objects hitting the atmosphere increases, which intensifies the meteor’s ablation (when the surface of an object loses material) in the atmosphere and slows it down even more.
A meteor explodes when the force of the unequal pressure on its front and back sides exceeds the maximum stress the object can withstand before disintegrating.
According to the AMA, thousands of meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day, but not all of them become bolides.
These exploding meteors are relatively rare and quite difficult to spot because their flashes last only a few seconds.
Mr. Dominick was lucky enough to capture this while filming Earth Time Panoramas (eng. timelapse) mode when the ISS flew over North Africa.
As soon as the space station passed over Cairo, Egypt, a bright explosion, first green and then white, flashed above our planet.
The astronaut posted a video of the incident on his X account. Both videos show the meteor passing over Cairo before bursting into flames.
Dominick began his mission to the ISS in March as mission commander for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8. Over the past five months, he has shared numerous photos and videos taken from his vantage point high above our planet, according to the Daily Mail.
2024-09-09 21:00:53