It happens every year around now, and this year should peak on May 5th at approximately 9pm EDT (in the wee hours of May 6th if you’re on GMT). Little pieces of material that once belonged to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet will zip into our atmosphere as meteors. The Eta Aquarids (so-called because the [...]

[Updated:] About 7,000 metric tons of meteor streaked across central Russia on Friday 15th February 2013, its fireball leaving great contrails in the sky and generating explosive shockwaves that smashed windows and damaged buildings. Reports indicate a number of craters a few meters across as the debris impacted the ground. The Earth is constantly encountering [...]

When a 17-meter asteroid barreled into Earth’s atmosphere over central Russia on February 15, releasing a powerful shock wave that injured more than 1,000 people, many observers wondered how such a momentous event could arrive unheralded. The fact is, the object that exploded in a fireball over Chelyabinsk, releasing hundreds of kilotons of energy, was [...]

A meteor fireball lit up the morning sky over Chelyabinsk in central Russia, producing a shock wave that shattered windows and injured an estimated 500 1,000 people.** Although much of the parent object likely burned up in the atmosphere, Russian authorities say that several meteorite fragments have already been recovered, according to the Interfax news agency. A [...]

Just before 7:45 P.M. Pacific time yesterday, as baseball fans in the San Francisco Bay Area were tuning in to the playoff game between the hometown Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals, a different spectacle was playing out overhead. A huge fireball lit up the skies over Northern California, and witnesses also heard very loud [...]

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.] 5) Supernova Space Rays Here on Earth, we’re under constant attack from space. Charged particles, primarily protons, crash into our atmosphere at close to the speed of light. We call them cosmic rays and we’ve finally found out where they come from. In order to [...]