"Mysterious light," loud explosion in Virginia Beach

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Smersh

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I wasn't sure whether to put this in Unexplainable, SS & A, ATA or even over in Live Science somewhere. Still, if it turns out to be a meteor or whatever, mods you can always move it to a relevent forum if you wish.

12:21 AM EDT on Monday, March 30, 2009

(VIRGINIA BEACH) - Emergency crews fanned out across the city looking for whatever caused a loud explosion Sunday night.

At around 9:45 911 dispatchers started receiving calls from people reporting a light in the sky followed by a loud boom.

Some reported that the explosion caused their homes to shake.

However, emergency crews could find no evidence of any kind of explosion.

No injuries, fires or damage were reported.

Full story here.

Has anyone across the pond heard anything more about this, or is there anyone here from Hampton Roads whio might have more info? Does anyone at all have idea what might have caused this? Thanks.
 
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newsartist

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Was it clear enough to have seen a meteor in Virginia Beach last night?

My money is on NAS Oceana for this one? Squadrons have been known to give a 'Sonic Salute' when returning from a deployment.

It is amazing how many times pencils and some such items, get "stuck in throttles."
 
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MeteorWayne

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Smersh, I'll leave it here for now, though it might get more action in the Unexplained. Lets watch, and maybe move it later; since at this time it certainly is Unexplained :)

newsartist, Va Beach NAS reported only a few clouds at the time. It was however close to the time of frontal passage. AFAIK, though all the big thunderstorms were across Delaware, PA, and NJ. I had pea sized hail here, other areas in NJ reported up to goif ball sized.

Now, in the past I have seen isolated thunderstorms produce just one huge honkin' (probably positive) lightning stroke, so that also must be considered a possibility. I'm trying to dig up radar from that time period to see if there was any activity that far down on the front. It seems a little late to be from the same line as it hit here at 6:45 PM.
 
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vogon13

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.


Maybe God was taking a shot at that charlatan/cretin Rev. Pat Robertson ????????????







.
 
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MeteorWayne

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After reading through the serious comments on this article,
http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2009/0 ... ast?page=1

it would appear it was a rather large meteoric fireball. I'll check the AMS fireball database in a few days to see how many reports show up. My guess would be quite a few for an event this size with a sonic boom.

MW
 
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Smersh

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MeteorWayne":ufhd4mqa said:
After reading through the serious comments on this article,
http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2009/0 ... ast?page=1

it would appear it was a rather large meteoric fireball. I'll check the AMS fireball database in a few days to see how many reports show up. My guess would be quite a few for an event this size with a sonic boom.

MW

Hi Wayne, yes I noticed another article online somewhere after I started this thread, saying the same as that one - ie there was more than one explosion and a multitude of lights. Are there any meteor showers atm that could have caused this, do you know?
 
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yevaud

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Note: the story has somewhat expanded. Reports of the same thing have appeared, centering along the mid-Atlantic coast:

BALTIMORE -- A team of scientists is looking into what could have caused bright lights in the sky that prompted hundreds of calls to the National Weather Service and emergency officials.

Callers from Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina described brilliant, streaking lights followed by an explosion-like sound around 9:45 p.m. Sunday.

http://www.wbaltv.com/news/19044505/detail.html
 
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MeteorWayne

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This also points to a meteoric fireball. They often cover many states, since the fireball starts so high in the atmosphere.
 
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wkRiley

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Sunday flash/boom

The flash and boom heard/seen in the Norfolk area: I also heard it from my home in Hampstead NC (near Wilmington). An important piece of info: the TV also went off briefly, and the outside street light dimmed for a few minutes. So this almost sounds like an EMF pulse.

Any other reports of electrical outages?
 
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yevaud

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Yep. It calved at altitude. Also, I noted the various descriptions of the colors (green at the leading edge, orange at the trailing), which would indicate the same to me.
 
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MeteorWayne

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Yes, that color description was common through most of the serious comments (about 10% of them) on the newspaper article.

I think I'm going to move this to Ask the Astronomer, if Smersh has no objections....
 
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MeteorWayne

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Re: Sunday flash/boom

Well, a large sonic boom can also shake open the contacts of relays. That's particularly a factor for the streelamp, because if it's a Mercury or Sodium vapor, they don't just come back on at full luminance right away. If it had been been a true EMP, not much would have come back on, since the controls for the electrical grid would likely have been fried.

I am going to merge this post in to another thread that will be in Ask the Astronomer shortly about the fireball event.
 
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jim48

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As of Monday afternoon, March 30, professor Richard Pierson, senior astronomer at Princeton University, has examined the "meteor". He is puzzled by the fact that it landed entirely intact, is made of solid metal and apparently hollow. He also reports strange noises coming from within. The landing of this object was preceded by several blasts of incandescent gas seen on the surface of Mars. Part of the object appears to be unscrewing to reveal an opening of some sort. Quite a crowd has gathered to watch. Fox News has dispatched an additional crew to the scene. CNN Science is reporting that more of the strange objects are reported down in other areas of the country as well. They are attempting to establish a link to their special consultant Dr. Clayton Forrester, the man behind the new atomic engines for his read on the phenomenon.
 
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Smersh

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MeteorWayne":19quu9te said:
Yes, that color description was common through most of the serious comments (about 10% of them) on the newspaper article.

I think I'm going to move this to Ask the Astronomer, if Smersh has no objections....

Sure Wayne - please do move it. We can get opinions then from others who rarely post in Freespace. :cool:
 
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MeteorWayne

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Excerpt from an updated article in the Virginian-Pilot:

http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2009/0 ... ast?page=3

By Diane Tennant
The Virginian-Pilot

If the fireball and explosion witnessed by residents along the mid-Atlantic coast Sunday night was a meteor, it's likely that fragments landed somewhere, an astronomy expert says.

The explosions occurred one to two minutes after the fireball disappeared, which means that a meteor penetrated deep into the atmosphere, said Alan MacRobert, senior editor of Sky and Telescope magazine. That makes it more likely that meteorites survived to hit the ground or ocean, although it is not certain.

MacRobert encouraged eyewitnesses to report what they saw at www.amsmeteors.org/fireball/report.html, or at www.spaceweather.com. Scientists can predict where to look for meteorites on the ground "if enough people can accurately reconstruct the flight path that they saw in the sky, or if they can simply say 'It went behind that tree,' " he said.

S. Kent Blackwell, an amateur astronomer, was sky-watching in Pungo when the explosion occurred around 10 p.m. Sunday.

"This brilliant green meteor was probably two or three times brighter than the full moon," Blackwell said. "Then it turned orange with a white core and disappeared."

One to two minutes later, a loud low-frequency noise shook houses in Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

"It was a very ominous, low-frequency rumble," said Robert Hitt, director of the Chesapeake planetarium, who lives in the Acredale section of Virginia Beach. "The sound was quite different from what you hear from thunder."
 
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Smersh

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Hmmm ... Live Science seems to think it was a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth ...

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Full story: http://www.livescience.com/space/090330 ... ebris.html

At least, the artice headline says it was. As quoted above, it seems to have been downgraded to "pretty convinced." The Spaceweather.com homepage has noted that as well and gives a link to the Live Science article, although they are still saying it could be a meteor as well.
 
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o_rune_o

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Just a bit of updating for everyone. The light and sound were heard up north here too. Pittsburgh, Pa...Erie, Pa...London, Ontario..and a couple place in Connecticut. That would suggest to me that it came from the North. I've also seen news reports from Georgia that people felt and heard it.
 
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Smersh

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o_rune_o":391s42zg said:
Just a bit of updating for everyone. The light and sound were heard up north here too. Pittsburgh, Pa...Erie, Pa...London, Ontario..and a couple place in Connecticut. That would suggest to me that it came from the North. I've also seen news reports from Georgia that people felt and heard it.

Welcome to Space.com o_rune_o and wkRiley who posted earlier and thanks for the info.

Yikes! Whatever it was, it seems like it was heard all the way up the Eastern seaboard from Georgia and into Canada ... :shock:
 
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MeteorWayne

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I strongly disagree Smersh. At that time, the perigee would have been on the other side of the planet, over eastern asia, in fact that is what this final reenty prediction shows.

http://www.reentrynews.com/2009015b.html

It would not have reentered over the US until sometime THIS afternoon, when the earth had rotated below the perigee point to place it over the US.

Wayne
 
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Smersh

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Yes Wayne, in fact at Spaceweather they are saying it re-entered somewhere near Taiwan, so I don't really know what that Navy bloke was thinking about when he came up with that theory ...

http://www.spaceweather.com
 
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MeteorWayne

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Unfortunately, it's far too common from astronomers who don't understand meteors and bolides, or don't take the time to understand how the orbits of spacecraft work. He probably got a cold phone call from someone asking for comment, and shot from the lip, whithout having done the research that I do every day here on the SDC forums. That goes for the SDC main page article as well. They really should consult with people who are immersed with the subject before printing such uninformed stuff. IMHOWIOCR.. :)

Wayne
 
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MeteorWayne

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http://www.space.com/news/090330-rocket ... l#comments

By Andrea Thompson (Just reporting what the news is, even though the USNO is quite possible wrong)
Senior Writer
posted: 30 March 2009
02:25 pm ET


The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.


"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.


Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.


Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.


He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.


The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi - the world's first two-time space tourist - to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.


Chester ran a satellite tracking program that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area where the fireball was spotted.


"This is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.


Chester said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is."


The descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were "entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something this big," Chester said.


Delta airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.


"We saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com. "It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were daylight."


James Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering rocket was very plausible. It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.


A rocket stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he said. And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over so wide an area.


The Soyuz rockets jettison their second stage after entering orbit in such a way that the second stage will slowly fall back to earth in a few days. But "you can control precisely where these things are going to come down," Chester said.


It's possible that some fragments of the rocket made it to the Earth's surface, but they would likely have a couple of hundreds of miles east of Cape Hatteras, Chester said.


"I don't think anybody will find anything on land," he said.
 
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jim48

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You mean it wasn't the vanguard of an invading army from Mars? Whew!!!
 
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Swampcat

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I live in Hampton Roads. Unfortunately, I was asleep at the time of the incident.

My fellow workers were talking about it at lunch. Some of them heard it. I told them about the Russian spacecraft that was supposed to re-enter, thinking that was what it was.
 
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Smersh

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MeteorWayne":rafy4s0z said:
Unfortunately, it's far too common from astronomers who don't understand meteors and bolides, or don't take the time to understand how the orbits of spacecraft work. He probably got a cold phone call from someone asking for comment, and shot from the lip, whithout having done the research that I do every day here on the SDC forums. That goes for the SDC main page article as well. They really should consult with people who are immersed with the subject before printing such uninformed stuff. IMHOWIOCR.. :)

Wayne

You'd think that the writers at SDC and Live Science would check their own forums first to see what the experts are saying! :twisted:
 
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