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Maudi

A couple of years ago driving to work in the dark and early am....out the passenger side of the car 2 hundred meters to my left there was a blue/green flash..and a bang..90 degree angle to the land..
I think it was a meteorite hitting the ground.
I remember reading a similiar description to what i saw in a mag..but cant recall where.has anybody seen anything like this
Would it have been a "strike"?

ScumLord

If even a small meteorite hit the ground 200 metres from you at a speed that would cause a flash I'd imagine it would be very, very loud. To reach the ground at speed it would have had to be fairly large entering the atmosphere, doing a tremendous speed and likely visible all the way down. I think in most cases the atmosphere slows down small meteorites to terminal velocity by the time it reaches the ground, so you wouldn't see it or hear it. It's possible though, we do apparently get millions of tons of space debris falling to earth every year but I thought most of it would be dust and not carrying enough energy to make it through our atmosphere at any great speed.

It could have been lightning, sometimes it acts weird with strikes going horizontal across the sky and hitting ground miles away from the storm.

Maudi

ScumLord wrote: »

If even a small meteorite hit the ground 200 metres from you at a speed that would cause a flash I'd imagine it would be very, very loud. To reach the ground at speed it would have had to be fairly large entering the atmosphere, doing a tremendous speed and likely visible all the way down. I think in most cases the atmosphere slows down small meteorites to terminal velocity by the time it reaches the ground, so you wouldn't see it or hear it. It's possible though, we do apparently get millions of tons of space debris falling to earth every year but I thought most of it would be dust and not carrying enough energy to make it through our atmosphere at any great speed.

It could have been lightning, sometimes it acts weird with strikes going horizontal across the sky and hitting ground miles away from the storm.

I didnt mention the noise as i cant recall if there was any or if my mind put it in as such..definitely not lightening on an otherwise quiet morning.it landed in some trees /field to my left..i can recall the colour..blue/green column ..i imagine its 2 metres wide or so..90dgrees to the earth..all in a split second.lit up the trees..i remember thinking "thats in the trees"..as it whooshed to the ground a column of smoke hung for moments. Id be fairly interested in astronomy so id be aware to some degree whats what..i also wonder would it be still there..

mickmackey1

It would be very unusual for the same observer to see both the meteorite flash and its landing zone. The big majority of meteorites strike the Earth at an angle, heat up by friction with the atmosphere causing the flash, and then continue for dozens of miles before landing. So the statistical likelihood of this being a meteorite is very low.

ScumLord

Maudi wrote: »

I didnt mention the noise as i cant recall if there was any or if my mind put it in as such..definitely not lightening on an otherwise quiet morning.

I wouldn't totally discount lightning, it can behave very strangely. I've heard stories of Americans standing at their window on a lovely day and getting hit by lightning from a storm that was over a hundred miles away. Sometimes lightning can come out of the ground, there's ball lightning, it could even have been a transformer blowing. The green blue colour just makes me think of electricity.

Popoutman

The green-blue colour is most likely excited air near standard pressure, and usually it's only electricity that can heat air fast enough to hot enough to create uncontained atmospheric plasma from the air.

Chances are the flash seen by the OP was a good bit farther than originally thought. It's hard to discern actual distance most of the time. Parallax effects dissipate at about a few tens of metres, and a very bright flash behind thin things like tree branches or a fence may be bright enough to appear in front of the thin things due to glare effects in the eyeball. Unless you specifically see that the bright thing was definitely in front of clouds, hills, nearby treeline etc, you can't be *sure* about distance - especially for a very bright very short duration event.

It is almost certainly not a meteorite landing, as meteorites from about 5 miles above the ground are no longer travelling fast enough to create plasma from the shock wave of their passing - even the Chelyabinsk bolide was dark and quiet when it hit the ground and that was the largest event in a century. Add to that the fact that large meteors are slow to cross the sky even if the flashes from breakup are bright, it's nothing like lightning. Even normal non-fireball meteors are from a second to a few seconds long.

You can check the archives on sites like this one to see if there were any lightning strikes in the area - don't forget to look up to 30 km from where you were in the direction you were looking.

A bright flash seen through a car window will also show glare from the tiny scratches in the glass and any finger/clothes marks inside the window. This would make a point source appear elongated, and may explain a columnar or bar appearance as seen by the OP.