Large bolide (meteor/fireball) seen over Japan on 20th January 2013 - with footage

Events like this one are surprisingly frequent, but it's rare for them to be caught on camera and for good quality footage to be captured although it is becoming more common as the number of cameras pointed at the sky increases. In this case the bolide was captured on multiple cameras! It may well have dropped meteorites on the ground since sonic booms were reported, which is usually a good indicator that something survived.





Related links:
Bolide observed in North Kanto area at 2:42 of 1/20/2013

The American Meteor Society Fireball FAQs

I saw one once, which was nice, and missed a larger one because my back was turned heeding nature's call against the side of a building - all I saw was the massive light. Nice find, thanks for posting this one.

Is this real? Why hasn't this been in the news or brought to more peoples attention because I'm pretty sure thats concerning

I read somewhere that 2013 was going to be the year or comets but I guess you could throw some fireballs in there too.

Originally posted by RooskiZombi
Is this real? Why hasn't this been in the news or brought to more peoples attention because I'm pretty sure thats concerning

I read somewhere that 2013 was going to be the year or comets but I guess you could throw some fireballs in there too.

It's only one fireball seen by different cameras. Bolides are not that uncommon -- several per year are seen around the world. Over the past several years there have been more and more caught on camera, but that could be attributed to the fact that there are so many more cameras (webcams, security cams, and such) out there.

These bolides break up in the atmosphere, and if pieces of meteor do manage survive, they rarely do any damage on the ground.

Originally posted by RooskiZombi
Is this real? Why hasn't this been in the news or brought to more peoples attention because I'm pretty sure thats concerning

The wake-up call was in 1994.

That's when we witnessed a series of impacts that released thousands of times as much destructive energy as the entire global nuclear arsenal of all countries combined:

Shoemaker–Levy 9

21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).

And that was only one fragment, there were 20 others.

That was the year it seemed like the threat was finally appreciated, and the search for objects that could impact Earth got more emphasis, and it continues to this day but we haven't found everything yet.

As recently as 1908 there was an impact in Tunguska that would have killed millions had it struck a populated area instead of an unpopulated area. While those events are rare, they do happen every few centuries, and we will probably have more like it unless NASA finds the objects in time and is able to divert them from impacting the Earth.

The smaller objects the size of a truck or less happen more frequently and cause huge fireballs like this, but they don't do any damage.