A meteorite, measuring one meter in diameter, lit up the skies of southern Ontario Saturday morning before crashing into Lake Ontario and along the coast of Grimsby, Ontario, in the Niagara Region.
The landing now has scientists asking residents to be on the lookout for space rocks, which could be billions of years old.
The European Space Agency said this is only the sixth time a meteorite, which becomes a meteorite when it falls to Earth and breaks up, has been detected well before impact by global asteroid warning systems .
The systems were able to tell scientists where and when the asteroid was going to hit.
The meteorite, labeled object C8FF042 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), hit Lake Ontario around 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning.
“Rare Occurrence in Southern Ontario”
People in southern Ontario, from Toronto to Brantford, saw the meteorite. Some shared footage from home security cameras on social media over the weekend of it catching fire and lighting up the night sky.
Others said they heard a loud sound around that time, which CBC researchers said was a sonic boom, made when the meteorite was traveling faster than the speed of sound.
Here’s a full frame view of the shiny pic.twitter.com/2e3lkfVhbG
@ScottWx_TWN
Peter Brown, professor of physics at Western University in London, Ontario, is a member of the Western Meteor Physics Group (WMPG), which studies meteors using cameras.
“We have a network of cameras in southern Ontario and southern Quebec and the network is constantly watching the night sky,” he said, adding that his meteor observation group has about 20 cameras trained on the sky.
Brown said WMPG’s goal is to capture images of “bright fireball-producing meteors,” like the one that landed in Lake Ontario over the weekend.
He said WMPG captured the meteor on 12 of its cameras and that it was “as bright as the moon” and could have been seen over most of southern Ontario where clouds didn’t block it. view
Brown said his group detects “several fairly bright meteors at night,” but said objects of this size, which is what creates the fireball, only hit Earth a few times a week and rarely times are documented in southern Ontario, he said.
Bright fireball over southern Ontario yesterday at 3:26 am caused by the impact of asteroid 2022WJ1. This sub-meter-sized asteroid (one of the smallest NEAs ever detected) produced a spectacular fireball, even though it was cloudy in many places. Western Meteor Network Video: pic.twitter.com/e5LkY7qWw4
—@pgbrown
“The fireball was only visible in southern Ontario, but there was a global network of telescopes and observers that were able to track the object as it came in,” he said, adding that the network of telescopes that They tracked the meteor around the world to help advance the science of meteor tracking.
“We hope that people … will start looking for these rocks. Scientists are very interested in being able to get samples of these rocks,” he said.
Space rocks are ‘frozen in time’ and ‘important’
Kim Tait is the Curator of Mineralogy, Meteorites and Gems at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and a former resident of Hamilton.
Tait said he encourages people who live near where the meteor hit Niagara to be on the lookout for pieces of space rock and to consider donating their findings to the ROM for Tait and his team to study.
“Many of the rocks in space are 4 1/2 billion years old,” he said.
“On Earth we have such a dynamic planet that recycles itself all the time, that has wind and rain and all these different characteristics that change the rocks. But these [meteor] rocks are frozen in time from a very early part of our solar system,” Tait said.
Residents of the Virgil, McNab and Port Weller areas of Niagara should be on the lookout for pieces of the meteor, which fell early Saturday morning. Researchers say rock hunters can tell if it’s a piece of the meteor by its weight, color and magnetism. (Western Meteor Physics Group/CBC News Graphics)
Brown said rock hunters can tell if it’s a piece of the meteor by its weight, color and magnetism.
“Meteorites are usually quite heavy for their size. They’re high density, they’re usually magnetic, so a magnet usually sticks to them,” he said.
“They often have a black outer crust, just like the black crust of a spacecraft going through the atmosphere. Re-entry melts the outer part of the meteorite.”
In particular, residents of the Virgil, McNab and Port Weller areas of Niagara should be on the lookout for meteor pieces, Brown said.
“Unfortunately it was a snowy weekend and things got buried pretty quickly,” Tait said.
“If everyone could see a little bit of the properties around the lake, that would be amazing.”
Meteorites often have a black outer crust, researchers say. This one was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum after it fell over Saskatchewan in 2008. It weighs 34.9 grams. (Submitted by the Royal Ontario Museum)
Tait said whoever finds the pieces of the meteor can decide whether to keep it or donate it to the ROM, but he hopes they will at least contact the museum’s natural history department to have a scientist come evaluate the rocks.
“In some cases, people like to keep them and I completely respect that [that] and I understand,” he said.
“But every time we open one, there’s something new to discover. So I think every rock in space is really important.”