Falling object ??

[jaydeehess]

A friend of mine reports that while driving on the highway in our region of N.W. Ontario Canada during daylight hours he witnessed a burning object fall past him. He believes it was about 300 meters in front of him and would have landed about a half kilometer to his north.

He says it was burning a bluish green.

My first thought was a meteorite but would it burn blue-green?
Perhaps a chunk of space debris with a copper content?

Anyone with other thoughts?

[PhantomWolf]

A lot of meteors are blue green as you can find out from a quick search. It's the oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere rather than the composition of the meteor that causes it. I'd be surprised if it really landed within a km of him too, people tend to think that they are far closer than they truely are.

[Kiwi]

Yep. I happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time about two weeks ago when a slowish blue-green meteor flashed across about 90 degrees of sky. It was a great sight. A few years ago I saw very fast, bright, brief meteor start vivid crimson which quickly faded out, then it finished with an equally vivid emerald green flash. Have never seen that before -- two almost opposite colours. Most colour changes I've seen have been between similar colours, blue-green, yellow-orange, or red-orange.

Astronomers at observatories are well accustomed to laypeople saying they are certain a meteor fell two paddocks away or a few hundred meters away, when in fact it may have been tens or even hundreds of kilometres away.

If a meteor fell on land 500 meters from someone, they would most likely hear a sonic boom or even a number of booms, possibly hear it crash, and also smell it.

We had a big daylight fireball in New Zealand on 7 July 1999. I remarked to three people about the odd-coloured cloud hovering in the sky around 4:45pm, and it wasn't until the 6pm news that I heard it was a high-altitude cloud from an exploding meteor that was seen from most of the North Island and caught on video from the top of the South Island. It also turned out later that I and a few other locals had heard the faint sound of two or three of its sonic booms. I had just thought it was a distant shotgun. Yet that meteor came closest to earth about 120 km away -- much closer to PhantomWolf -- and that was the closest it came to my area.

[jaydeehess]

I was skeptical of the distances he related but did not tell him so.

Thanks PW, yes I should have guessed the colour would be from the air rather than the mineral content.