LOS ANGELES >> Sean Akers was relaxing on his porch in Beachwood Canyon on Wednesday night when something bright caught the corner of his eye.
“At first I thought it was fireworks,” said Akers, 40, a film producer. “It looked like it was breaking apart and sparkling. It did look like a shower of pieces, not just one piece.”
Without his phone handy to snap a photo, Akers rushed to the Twittersphere to validate what he saw with other eyewitness accounts. As it turns out, Akers did not see a firework, but a fireball: a meteor streaking through the atmosphere and lighting up the night sky from here to Arizona.
“It was pretty,” Akers said, “and I was hoping I’d see more.”
Fireballs, though not as large as the one witnessed Wednesday, are a common occurrence, but a rare and ballyhooed sight in the Los Angeles skies made glossy by light pollution. Scientists are saying the meteor likely withered to dust in the atmosphere.
Coincidentally, just hours before reports started pouring in around 8 p.m., a new study revealed that earthly asteroid impacts are 10 times greater than scientists previously thought. The study, released in three parts in Nature journal and Science journal, provides the most complete picture yet of the 25-million-pound asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, injuring hundreds of people and leveling buildings.
Researchers looked at recent fireball data over the last several decades and concluded that the impact rate per year was higher than previously thought based on fireball observations.
“Obviously they’re unrelated,” said Bruce Betts, director of projects at the Planetary Society. “And in fact, it’s much smaller than what they’re talking about. This particular fireball was not in the realm.”
Based on the time of year and the hurtling meteor’s direction, Wednesday’s fireball seemed to originate from the same region that the Taurid meteors come from, according to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Taurid meteors are split into north and south portions. The South Taurid meteor shower, made up of fragments of the Comet Encke, are expected to shower through Tuesday.
Based on early reports, Yeoman estimated the size of the meteor to be about the size of a basketball.
“It’s unusual for an object of this size to be part of the Taurid meteor shower,” Yeoman said. “It was certainly larger than a traditional meteor, which is about the size of a grain of sand.”
As a fireball hurtled through the atmosphere at about 60,000 mph, it heats up the atmosphere to thousands of degrees, burning the night sky into an eye-catching glow.
“When we see that glowing light, we’re actually looking at something much, much larger than the pebble that’s causing it,” said Edwin Krupp, Griffith observatory director. “It’s a column of air that might be 10 miles across. Air is heated so effectively it becomes bright enough to see.”
A video of the comet streaking through the night sky was posted by KCAL. The only photos that seemed to surface on social media were fake. Like the fireball it centered around, social media was lighting up with reports Wednesday and Thursday.
“I saw a meteor tonight, the coolest scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” @Casheets from San Gabriel tweeted. The witness said the fireball was “bright yellowish” and blue” as it fell from the sky.
“I just saw an absolutely INSANE #meteor in the sky above Glendale, CA … Either that or the alien invasion has begun,” comedian Eli Braden tweeted.
“Huge meteor in the sky above Los Angeles. Beautiful. #meteor #LA” Akers of Beachwood tweeted.
Nobody in the Near Earth Object Program or Griffith Observatory reported seeing the fireball.
“What we’ve got here is not so much a rare event, but it’s the kind of event that our short memories and desire for spectacle are paying attention to at the moment,” Krupp said.
Before Akers noticed the meteor, he read the study that says Earth is more likely to be hit by catastrophic asteroids. But it didn’t ruin the moment, he said.
“Scientifically, it’s still a very small possibility,” Akers said. “If you’re constantly looking for things to scare you, it’s pretty easy to find them.”
Betts said the job of the Planetary Society is to find, track, characterize and ultimately decide how to deflect debris that is heading toward Earth. Debris hitting the Earth atmosphere and making a spectacle like Wednesday happen “all the time; it’s just more common during meteor showers,” Betts said.
“Fireballs and meteor showers are fun to see, but they are reminders there are bigger objects out there, and we need to take the actions necessary to protect Earth from those,” he said.