Lots of Meteors recently ... a few questions...

Not sure if this is the right place for this, if not; please move it mods. I've noticed recently there have been alot more posts about meteors. I've noticed alot more meteors in general both here, and elsewhere. I'm no scientist, or anything...but does that mean there are actually more events occuring?

Are meteors happening more, and more often?

Personally it makes me think that maybe somethings going on. Could anyone find some actual evidence for, or against, this? I mean something verifiable, not a youtube vid, or anything like that.

And if there are indeed more meteors happening; what does that bode for us?

reply to post by jjsr420


I've been seeing 3-4 EVERY night. Much more than the normal 0-1 a night.

reply to post by jjsr420


You can try here:

American Meteor Society

or here

NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network

reply to post by GoldenObserver

Interesting. I've seen a few myself over the past few days; typically I don't see any for the most part though. But if there are more of them happening, what does that mean for us? Are we entering some sort of cosmic 'shooting gallery'?

reply to post by Carreau

Thanks for the links, but honestly that tells me nothing. I'm looking for anything showing evidence for, or against, a climb in meteoric activity over a period of time.

I believe Earth has always been in the middle of a perpetual shooting gallery.

Ever take a close look at the moon?

Where do you think all those divets came from?

reply to post by Tinkerpeach

But does the rise in activity signify either a large impact, or many smaller impacts?

reply to post by jjsr420


Some people will say, that it has to do with our planet's revolutions around the sun, which in turn, passes through different areas of space where there are more meteorites and debris at certain seasons than at others. 

Personally, I think it has to do with our entire solar systems orbit around the Milky Way (Cosmic Year). Many ancient cultures were aware of this cycle, the Mayans for example. We are probably passing into a different area of the universe, where space debris is more abundant. There's also the possibility of our solar system entering an area of higher energy in the universe, this would explain many types of strange phenomena on earth as of late.

I made a thread not to long ago that covered a few of these aspects if you are interested.

jjsr420
reply to post by Tinkerpeach

 

But does the rise in activity signify either a large impact, or many smaller impacts?

No

As to your question specifically, there has been nothing happening to cause more meteor activity. Mars didn't blow up and is sending a bunch of new stuff our way or anything. Our gravitational pull did not increase, bringing more space debris into our atmosphere or anything like that.

Throw a bunch of Ping-Pong balls in a pool, wait a few minutes and go in. As you swim around you will pass through some open water and spots where a lot of balls have seemed to mass together.

Its kind of the same analogy.

We will simply pass through stuff or it will pass by us.

Odds are there are simply more people looking up at the sky and taking pictures. Maybe Best Buy had a sale on cameras recently or something but nothing new has happened to cause more meteor impacts.

reply to post by jjsr420


I wouldn't lose any sleep over the idea of a huge space rock hitting the Earth.

It seems there are more sightings as of late but I don't think it's anything ominous.

There isn't anything we can do if there is a huge asteroid headed our way. (I don't think it will happen in our lifetime.)

reply to post by Tinkerpeach

In that pool scenario....exactly how many balls do you actually touch though?

And believe, i'm NOT gonna loose sleep over it. Me and my wife JUST (last week) got our house after five years of homelessness. So i'm happy regardless. ^-^

reply to post by jjsr420


Yeah that first site is pretty worthless it only goes back to 2004 and shows EVERY reported meteor in ALL 50 states that can be viewed by day/week/month/year/location/ect over the last 10+ years and keeps running total amount of reports ie raw numbers. Your welcome.

reply to post by Carreau

If I could figure out how to get it to work yea. lol.

reply to post by jjsr420


Please click me

By the way the Nasa site has a data base going back to 1993

reply to post by jjsr420


I think its just been a few more big ones. Out on the ocean with no lights you can see several shooting stars an hout every night.

The end of summer and fall give us the persieds, taurids, and another shower in november.

I think the two huge ones we saw over us last night (like HUGE reported in 8states and ontario) wer probably part of thw taurids. My brother saw the one that came through at 1150 and it was so bright and lasted so long he thought it was a plane crashing.

When a shooting star lasts so long you can point it out to other people and they have time to see it.. its a pretty good sized object.

reply to post by jjsr420


Somewhere between 36 and 166 meteorites larger than 10 grams fall to Earth per million square kilometers per year, which translates to 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites bigger than 10 grams over the whole surface of the Earth per year.

Source

I would submit that the events aren't happening more often, but are being reported more often.

As what I once heard in a presentation of Susan Joy Rennison, that we're entering other parts of space that cross our solar system. That's maybe why we are seeing more meteor showers or impacts

The are two major meteor showers in October. The Draconid meteor shower falls early in the month, followed by the Orionids a few weeks later. What has surprised me are some of the rather unusually large meteors that have been reported since the big one in Russia that injured reportedly 1000+ people. There was another large one last night over Ohio but I have not heard of any injuries or even if it struck the ground.

reply to post by ProfessorChaos

Do we know how many grams one has to be to actually impact? That's a really big number. Out of those, how many actually impact?
reply to post by 0bserver1

Aren't we always entering new (to us) parts of space???
reply to post by 727Sky

The next one is:The next meteor shower is the Orionids on the night of October 21
The gibbous Moon, which is about 90 percent full on the night of the 21st, rises by mid-evening and soars high across the sky during the night. Its light will overpower all but the brightest of the meteors.
from stardate.org...

visualizing.org...

This little representation right here should anwser your question. Why, idk, but is most definitely a fact that they are becoming more frequent. I just checked fragile Earth section just now and one in Ohio and one in Brazil and those are just the most recent ones witnessed.

reply to post by jjsr420


The numbers I put up are averages from the source site, I would imagine that the sizes of the meteorites that strike Earth vary as well.

Obviously, almost all of the strikes being reported are barely big enough to make the news, let alone make any other kind of "impact".

From what I have seen as far as reports go, these strikes are only notable because more of the planet is becoming inhabited, therefore, more of them are being witnessed.