Meteor explosion above Bering Sea unleashed 10 times as much energy as atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima ... and no one saw it
- It was the largest air blast since another meteor hurtled into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s southwest, six years ago
At precisely 11:48am on December 18, 2018, a large space rock heading straight for Earth at a speed of 30km per second exploded into a vast ball of fire as it entered the atmosphere, 25km above the Bering Sea.
From below, the only witnesses to this fiery event may have been the fish that inhabit the frigid waters between Russia and Alaska, as no human eye caught sight of it.
A meteor is the luminous phenomenon that results when an asteroid or other celestial body enters the Earth’s atmosphere. It is commonly called a shooting star. If it does not fully vaporise and some part of it hits the Earth’s surface, it is called a meteorite.
One of the first researchers to detect the event was Peter Brown, a meteor scientist at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario.
On March 8, he was poring over December data from the system used by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation to detect atmospheric explosions caused by nuclear tests.