Texas Fireball

Texas fireball is now a bit of a mess from all the updates, so I thought I’d post a cleaner version of what’s going on now. A tremendous fireball — also called a bolide, or a very bright meteor — was seen in southern Texas on Sunday, February 15th, just before 11:00 a.m. local time. Many people have described it as very bright, small, and moving rapidly.

Some people have attributed this event to debris from the two satellites that collided over the Earth last week. I was initially very skeptical of this, then relented a bit. Now I am sure it was not debris from the satellites. Why? OK, that deserves it’s own number. I’ve seen man-made debris re-enter, and it’s very different than natural meteors. The difference in speed is very obvious. Right there, that’s enough to make me think this was a single natural object.

The video shows the fireball to be moving very rapidly. Typically, meteors come into Earth’s atmosphere at 20-50 km/sec (though they can be moving much faster), and burn up 50-100 km high. Man-made space debris re-entering is moving at slower than orbital speed so the max speed is about 8 km/sec. It also burns up lower, and generally you can see flames and whatnot coming off.