By Wendy Patterson
MIRAMICHI - A second person has reported seeing an unusually bright meteor on New Year's Eve.
Sandra Sabine was on her way home with her youngest daughter, Brittany, when she stopped at the Douglastown post office around 4:45 p.m. to pick up her mail.
She glanced up at the sky just in time to see it lit up by a bright bluish flash.
"I said, ‘Oh my God, I just saw the biggest shooting star ever. I better make a wish!'" she explained with a laugh.
She immediately called to her daughter to look, but by that time the meteor was gone.
She added that from where she was standing, the shooting star seemed to be to the north of her position, toward the Bathurst highway.
"It lit up the whole sky," she said.
A motorist on his way from Bathurst had also reported seeing the phenomenon that night, and it was after reading his story in the newspaper that she decided to call, Sabine said.
Bob Hawkes, professor of physics at Mount Allison University, is an expert on meteor phenomena. He said that he had not heard any reports about the New Year's Eve meteor sighting, but that fireballs like this one are not that unusual.
"It's isn't as rare as people think," he said, adding that Canadians often see one or two a week.
As well, he continued, the brightness of the meteor was not necessarily an indication that it was a large object, as even something the size of a basketball could make a very bright fireball, and our eyes can see a meteor the size of a pea.
"In general the brightness depends on the size of the object and the speed it's coming in," he said.
Meteors usually start producing light about 100 km above the ground, and can look very close to observers, Hawkes explained, especially when they are quite bright and appear to fall right down to the horizon.
However, the apparent proximity can be misleading, and it's impossible to determine how far away the New Year's Eve meteor actually was without reports from outside the Miramichi area.
The colour of a meteor depends primarily on the material it's made of, he said. Iron, calcium, silicone and other elements create different colours as the energy created by air striking the meteor at tremendous speed causes them to boil at a temperature of a few thousand degrees.
As the material boils away and combines with atmospheric particles, the colour becomes visible, and you can tell things about the composition of a meteor by the spectrum of colours around it, he said.
Often, though, we may not be able to see the entire spectrum, or the object may appear white, as our colour vision fades over distance.
The colour may be influenced by atmospheric conditions, too, he said, as with a sunset. When a meteor appears predominantly red, this is often the reason.
Green is the most common colour, but blue is not that unusual, either, he added.
It's unlikely that the meteor seen in our area hit the ground, Hawkes said, although sometimes meteors do strike the earth, leaving behind a crater and surviving bits of material called meteorites.
"Most meteorites are not terribly different from most stones," he said, adding that, like a lot of everyday rocks, they are made up mostly of silicone dioxide.
However, many meteors evaporate completely before ever getting close to the ground, and Hawkes said only the large and relatively slow ones typically make it to earth.
A "slow" meteor travels at about 11 km/second, while the faster ones can go as much as 72 km/second, creating temperatures averaging 2000 degrees Celsius.
Although our fireball occurred a few days before the annual appearance of the Quadrantid meteors, Hawkes said that most fireballs are not associated with meteor showers.
He added that anyone who sees a meteor or finds meteorites can report their sightings at http://miac.ukac.ca/MIAC.
http://miramichileader.canadaeast.com/n ... cle/543909
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