Scientists ask residents in Niagara, Ont., to look for meteor pieces after weekend fireball | 24CA News

A meteor, one metre in diameter, lit up the southern Ontario sky early Saturday morning earlier than it crash landed in items into Lake Ontario and alongside the shoreline of Grimsby, Ont., within the Niagara area.

The touchdown now has scientists asking residents to maintain a watch out for the house rocks — which could possibly be billions of years outdated. 

The European Space Agency mentioned that is solely the sixth time that a meteor, which turns into meteorites because it falls to earth and breaks aside, has been detected effectively earlier than impression by international asteroid warning methods. 

The methods had been in a position to inform scientists the place and when the asteroid was going to hit. 

The meteorites, labelled object C8FF042 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), hit Lake Ontario round 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning.

‘Rare incidence in southern Ontario’

People throughout southern Ontario, from Toronto to Brantford, caught sight of the meteor. Some shared dwelling safety digicam footage on social media over the weekend of it catching fireplace and lighting up the evening sky.

Others mentioned they heard a loud sound round that point, which researchers CBC spoke to mentioned was a sonic growth, made because the meteor travelled sooner than the velocity of sound.

Peter Brown, a physics professor at Western University in London, Ont., is a member of the Western Meteor Physics Group (WMPG), which research meteors utilizing cameras. 

“We have a network of cameras in southern Ontario and southern Quebec and the network is constantly watching the night sky,” he mentioned, including that his meteor watching group has about 20 cameras skilled on the sky. 

Brown mentioned WMPG’s purpose is to seize footage of “bright meteors that produce fireballs,” just like the one which landed in Lake Ontario over the weekend. 

He mentioned WMPG captured the meteor on 12 of their cameras, and that it was as “bright as the moon” and will have been seen throughout most of southern Ontario, in locations the place the clouds did not block it from view. 

Brown mentioned his group detects “several fairly bright meteors a night,” however mentioned objects of this measurement — which is what creates the fireball — solely hit the earth a couple of instances every week and are hardly ever documented in southern Ontario, he mentioned.

“The fireball was only visible in southern Ontario, but there was a global network of telescopes and observers who were able to track the object as it came in,” he mentioned, including that the community of telescopes monitoring the meteor from world wide will assist advance meteor monitoring science. 

“We’re hoping people will… start looking for those rocks. Scientists are very interested in being able to get samples of those rocks,” he mentioned. 

Rocks from house are ‘frozen in time’ and ‘essential’

Kim Tait is the mineralogy, meteorite and gem curator on the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and a former Hamilton resident. 

Tait mentioned she encourages folks residing close to the place the meteorites hit in Niagara to maintain a watch out for items of house rock, and think about donating their discoveries to the ROM, for Tait and her crew to review. 

“A lot of the rocks from space are 4 1/2 billion years old,” she mentioned. 

“On Earth we have such a dynamic planet that is recycling itself all the time, that has wind and rain and all these different features that change the rocks. But these [meteor] rocks are frozen in time from very early part of our solar system,” Tait mentioned. 

Brown mentioned rock hunters can inform if it is a piece of the meteor by its weight, color and magnetism. 

“Meteorites are are typically pretty heavy for their size. They’re high density, they’re magnetic usually, so a magnet will usually stick to them,” he mentioned. 

“They often have an outer crust that’s black, just like the black crust from a spacecraft that’s coming through the atmosphere. The reentry sort of melts the outer part of the meteorite.”

Brown mentioned particularly residents of the Virgil, McNab and Port Weller areas of Niagara ought to maintain a watch out for items of the meteor. 

“Unfortunately it was a snowy weekend and things got buried pretty quickly,” Tait mentioned. 

“If everybody can have a little look out into the properties around the lake that would be amazing.”

Tait mentioned whoever finds the items of the meteor can determine whether or not they need to maintain it or donate it to the ROM, however she hopes they’ll not less than contact the museum’s pure historical past division to have a scientist come and assess the rocks. 

“In some cases people do like to to keep them and I completely respect [that] and understand,” she mentioned. 

“But every single time we open up one, there is something new to be discovered. So I think every rock from space is really important.”