May 1, 2024
On the night of May 1, bright flashes were seen in the sky over Ukraine.
They were recorded by residents of several regions, including Kyiv Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, Sumy Oblast, Poltava Oblast, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro.
No alarm was declared in the regions during the outbreak, and no sounds of explosions were heard.
Footage from video surveillance cameras quickly spread across the Internet. In particular, one of the videos shows how a celestial body entered the atmosphere and flashed a bright blue light.
Later there were assumptions that it was a meteor.
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What was it?
“Definitely, this is an object that flew in from space,” Ivan Kryachko, head of the laboratory at the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, explained in a comment for the Ukrainian BBC.
It can be of natural origin, and then it is a bright bolide, that is, a very bright meteorite. Or of artificial origin, that is, a piece of so-called space debris.
“By space debris, we mean the remains of various spacecraft, rocket launchers and even tools that astronauts and cosmonauts who leave the space station lose from time to time,” the expert added.
This garbage, according to him, flies around the Earth, slowly entering and burning up in the atmosphere.
However, this phenomenon is not something special for scientists, Kryachko emphasized.
“Of course, people are amazed, people were excited by it. But the scientific community, astronomers in particular, are not particularly concerned about such things, because we have observed many, many bright bolides in our history,” he noted.
Did the remains of this body reach Earth? The scientist doubts this.
“If they even made it, then these are very small fragments – that is, it actually burned up in the atmosphere of our planet.”
Photo copyright, Telegram
Photo caption: Residents of several regions of Ukraine saw the flash on the night of April 1
Astronomer Mykhailo Lashko also confirmed that the flares are meteoric in nature.
According to him, this is a completely natural and safe phenomenon.
“It is at the end of April – beginning of May that the Earth passes through two meteor streams – Iris and Eta-Aquarida. Most likely, this meteor, or superbolid, as it is also called, was from the meteor shower of Eta-Aquarida. The stream itself was generated by a comet Alley”, — explained scientist to the Society.
He added that a comet during its movement around the Sun loses its particles – pebbles, dust – and obviously, in this case, on the night of May 1, such a particle flew into the atmosphere over Ukraine and burned up there.
Such phenomena do not cause any harm to people.
According to Lashko, approximately thousands of tons of meteorite fall to the Earth. The most active meteor showers occur in July-August and in winter. And there are only about 10 active currents around the Earth per year.
Meteors and meteorites
Every April, Earth passes through the plume of Comet Thatcher, which leaves the Lyrid meteor shower.
It got its name from the constellation Lyra. The source of the meteor shower is the large amount of dust and small debris left behind by the comet when it passes near the Sun.
Photo by THOMAS KRONSTEINER
image captionStar trails during the Lyrid meteor shower in the sky over Austria. This photo was created by combining multiple exposures
Lyrids are very fast (their speed can reach 49 km/sec) and bright meteors, which do not leave long burning trails, instead, their sign is bright flashes, or so-called “fireballs”. Eyewitnesses could see just such a ball in the night sky over Kyiv.
The word “meteor” refers to the light phenomenon in the Earth’s atmosphere that occurs when a solid celestial body moving in interplanetary space, or a meteoroid, enters the atmosphere. Instead, a meteorite is the remnant of a meteoroid that survived its journey through the atmosphere and fell to earth.
The Lyrid meteor shower is one of the oldest known to mankind. The first mention of it dates back to 687 BC. BC and was found in a short chronicle of ancient China – Zuozhuang.
Last year, the Earth entered the plume of Comet Thatcher on April 15, 2023, and left it on April 29, the State Space Agency of Ukraine reported.
Other similar cases
A similar incident occurred in February 2023. A meteorite celestial body during the explosion lit up the sky over northern France – this was recorded by surveillance cameras and eyewitnesses.
Meteoroid Sar 2667 entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over the English Channel. This event was one of the brightest in recent times – the “shooting star” was seen even in England, hundreds of kilometers away.
In April 2002, the Neuschwanstein meteorite fell in Germany – it got its name in honor of the famous castle in Bavaria, near which it fell.
The fall of the meteorite caused a stir in the mass media, and it was observed by eyewitnesses in most of the countries of Central Europe.
According to reports, the sound of the falling meteorite was heard as far as 100 km away. The meteor left a spectacular trail in the night sky before disintegrating into half a dozen yellow-orange fragments about 22 kilometers above the ground. In total, this celestial action lasted about six seconds.
The debris of the meteorite fell on an area of several square kilometers. The area of the crash attracted meteorite debris hunters for months after the crash. As a result, they found three fragments with a total weight of about 6 kilograms.
One of the largest meteorites in history fell on February 15, 2013 near the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. According to NASA, before entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the object had a diameter of about 17 meters, a mass of up to 10,000 tons and moved at a speed of 18 km/s.
It exploded at an altitude of 19 to 24 km, the power of the explosion was about 500 kilotons.
image copyrightAFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Photo caption, Consequences of a meteorite fall in Chelyabinsk
Due to the fall of the meteorite in the Chelyabinsk region, many were injured – more than one and a half thousand. Most of them were injured by broken glass.
The main part of the meteorite – a fragment weighing 654 kg – was lifted from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul in October 2013.
According to NASA, this meteorite is the largest among the meteorites that have fallen to Earth in the last century – after the Tunguska meteorite of 1908.
