Meteor spotted above city on Saturday
Estimated size of space rock suggests fragments made it to earth: geologist
A dreary Saturday evening in the Edmonton area was interrupted when a meteor whizzed over the city at 10:23 p.m.
Local amateur astronomer Bruce Mccurdy had front-row seats to the action. He was volunteering at the Telus World of Science’s RASC Observatory, chatting with visitors, when he was interrupted by a bright flash of light.
“I happened to be standing beside one of the telescopes, right under the sky, talking to a couple of visitors, and this interloper came firing across the southeastern sky and left its mark,” said Mccurdy, who is also a writer for the Journal’s Cult of Hockey blog.
“It got a huge reaction from the people who were there, myself included.”
While the meteor passed far too quickly for detailed measurements — it was overhead for five seconds, at most — Mccurdy quickly made note of some key attributes of the event. He then used that information to file a report with the International Meteor Organization.
“In the shock of the moment, I tried to get an accurate sense of the details,” Mccurdy said. “The direction, how fast it was going, how bright it was, what colour it was, the fragmentation that we saw near the end.”
Chris Herd, a University of Alberta geologist who is the province’s foremost expert on meteorites, wasn’t lucky enough to catch a first-hand glimpse of the fireball because he spent the long weekend camping in northeast Alberta. But after poring over social media reports, he’s excited to dig into the event.
“The size, we don’t know yet, but the fact that some people reported sounds and that it changed in brightness as it came down would certainly suggest that this is what we call a meteoroid,” Herd said. “That would be the rock as it came in from space as it goes through the atmosphere.”
Herd speculated that the meteor was about one metre in size, which could create “a fair number of pieces” on the ground. The significance of the event is that it happened at the perfect time for a whole city to get a chance to see it, he said.
“It happening at a time when people were out and about or there were clear skies; you have to have a convergence of factors,” Herd said, adding that space rocks, though usually smaller than this one, enter the atmosphere every day.
In his 33 years of watching the skies, Saturday night marked the second brightest fireball Mccurdy has ever seen.
The first, by far, was the famed Buzzard Coulee meteorite, which streaked across Alberta in 2008 and split into more than 1,000 pieces when it landed just over the Saskatchewan border, sparking an intensive search.
This meteor could spur a similar, but smaller-scale search, Mccurdy said.
Using videos and eyewitness reports, astronomers will triangulate the probable landing area for any pieces of meteorite.
“The fireball, in my opinion, was bright enough that there’s a non-zero chance it produced meteorites. And a non-zero chance of meteorites means a 100-per-cent chance of followup,” Mccurdy said.
“The hope is that if there was a fall, it didn’t come down somewhere like a lake, that it actually came down somewhere you can pursue it.”
Footage shared on social media, as well as specialty cameras set up across the province to help accurately calculate the trajectory of meteors, may help Herd and his team locate any meteorites that made it to the ground.
For academics like Herd, getting a hold of meteorites helps them determine where the rock came from in the solar system. It also lets them get rare direct access to an extraterrestrial object.
“This is a freshly arrived rock from space,” Herd said. “That’s a pristine sample, a rock sample from space. The faster we can get to it, the more scientifically valuable it is because it retains that original character.”
If people find a rock they think is a meteorite, Herd said they should report it to the U of A. He also noted that space rocks are the property of the owner of the land they fall on.
Social media was immediately abuzz with excitement after the night sky lit up, with users sharing videos of the meteor.
Sightings came in from a wide area of north-central Alberta, from Wabamun, 70 kilometres west of Edmonton, all the way to Vilna, which is 150 kilometres northeast of the city.
In an era-appropriate turn of events, most clips of the fireball were recorded by doorbell cameras.
It happening at a time when people were out and about or there were clear skies; you have to have a convergence of factors,