Harju County security camera picks up impressive meteor flash
A Harju County man was amazed to find his home security camera had captured an apparent meteor earlier this week, Maaleht reported.
On Monday evening Sten, a resident of Saue municipality, just outside Tallinn, noticed a white streak and flash coming through the window while watching TV.
"Later, when I checked the security camera footage, it showed something like an asteroid falling from the sky," he told the paper.
Astronomer Taavi Niittee said "it seems that the video captured a rather powerful meteor," meaning it was less than one meter in diameter (larger than that would constitute an asteroid) with no rock striking the Earth (which would make it a meteorite).
In the latter case "the sight would have been far more dramatic, and its fall would already be international news," he added.
"From the video, the meteoric body appears to move quite fast, so I tend to think it was a sporadic, or random, meteor," he continued, noting more details including direction, altitude, the precise time of the sighting, would be needed to say more.
Niittee estimated the size of the meteor at "somewhere between a cherry and a golf ball," adding "in any case, it's an interesting capture — especially considering how cloudy the weather has been lately."
Earth is currently passing through the meteor stream known as the Northern Taurids, though the current rate of around five meteors per hour with meteors moving at a fairly languid 17 km/s making for a relatively lackluster meteor show — meaning Sten's spot is likely not a part of that origin.
Prehistoric meteorite craters in the village of Kaali, on Saaremaa, are the result of one of just a few major impact events worldwide which had occurred in a populated area and so likely would have been witnessed.
The most famous strike formed the Kaali meteorite crater, estimated to have been formed over 3,000 years ago, at a time when Estonia was at the Nordic Bronze Age state of development, and was thinly populated. With an impact energy comparable with that of the 1945 Hiroshima atom bomb blast, the strike would have incinerated forests and anything else living within around a six-kilometer radius of the site.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
Source: Delfi Meedia
