Results tagged “fireball”

If tonight ends up being (another?) a late night for you, you might want to step outside and take a look up in the skies:

After the Moon sets – around 11 p.m. local time on Nov. 5, later on subsequent nights – some 10 to 15 meteors may appear per hour. They are often yellowish-orange and, as meteors go, appear to move rather slowly. Their name comes from the way they seem to radiate from the constellation Taurus, the Bull, which sits low in the east a couple of hours after sundown and is almost directly overhead by around 1:30 a.m. [Yahoo! News]

This upcoming round of Taurid meteor showers, often thought of as "shooting stars" will contain larger fragments than other meteors, which means we might see something akin to "fireballs" in the sky.

Earlier this month, a mysterious fireball flew over the Los Angeles region. And now today, an e-mail tipster sends this to our inbox: "There was some sonic boom noise in Santa Monica, and all my neighbors reported hearing it, but nobody could figure out what this was. Have you heard of it? My coworker swears she saw a 'low flying shooting star that exploded over the ocean.'" Santa Monica Police report no calls about anything as such. Anyone else hear or see anything? Comment below.

The LAist tipster who saw something from his Beverly Hills office window wasn't the only person to see the fireball. While few reports came in the Los Angeles area (the LAFD told LAist there were zero 911 calls), most calls came in from Riverside and San Bernardino counties. A San Bernardino County dispatch supervisor told the LA Times that "fire crews in Barstow and on I-15 near Stateline came up on the radio and reported an object in the sky moving very fast across the northern sky and described it as yellowish green in color with streaks of debris. It looked like it burned up before it hit the ground." The FAA reports no planes missing and officials searching for any sign of impact are not finding anything yet.