
No, I have to agree with one of the comments that it is a jet contrail reflecting sunset lighting above the lower level foreground clouds. It would be nice to know the orientation of the videographer.
"Theoretical arguments suggest that there are magnetic structures on scales as small as a kilometre or less," wrote Thomas. The filaments observed are typically 150 to 180 km wide, and their dark cores are less than 90 km wide.
Listening to Leonids
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast26nov_1/
November 26, 2001: All at once there was a eye-squinting flash of light and a strange crackling noise. Puzzled sky watchers looked at one another ... and confessed: "Yes, I heard it, too."
Hearing meteors? It could happen -- and indeed it did, plenty of times during this month's Leonid meteor storm.
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"I am sure I could hear several of the meteors," recalled Karen Newcombe, a Leonid watcher from San Francisco -- one of many who reported meteor sounds to Science@NASA on Nov. 18th. "Several times when a Leonid with a persistent debris train flew directly overhead, I heard a faint fizzing noise [instantly]." There was no delay between the sight and the sound.
"How is that possible when the meteor was so many miles above my head?" she wondered.
The same question has bedeviled some of history's greatest scientists. For example, in 1719 astronomer Edmund Halley collected accounts of a widely-observed fireball over England. Many witnesses, wrote Halley, "[heard] it hiss as it went along, as if it had been very near at hand." Yet his own research proved the meteor was at least "60 English miles" high. Sound takes about five minutes to travel such a distance, while light can do it in a fraction of a millisecond. Halley could think of no way for sky watchers to simultaneously hear and see the meteor.
Baffled, he finally dismissed the reports as "pure fantasy" -- a view that held sway for centuries.
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Here's how it works: Radio waves induce currents in electrical conductors. "Strong, low-frequency currents can literally shake ordinary objects," explains Dennis Gallagher, a space physicist at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "When things shake, they launch vibrations into the air, which is what we hear."
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When a meteoroid races through Earth's atmosphere, the air around it becomes a plasma -- that is, a cloud of ionized gas. Plasmas have a curious property: Lines of magnetic force that permeate them become trapped. Wherever the plasma goes, the magnetic field follows. If a magnetized plasma becomes turbulent, the magnetic fields inside it become twisted and tangled as well.
The plasma tails of certain meteors do become turbulent, says Keay, and they are permeated by a magnetic field: Earth's. "The plasma is swirling so fast that the magnetic field can be scrambled up like spaghetti." And therein lies a source of energy for VLF waves.
Keay continues: Eventually the plasma cools. Electrons return to the atoms from which they were earlier ripped, and the gas becomes neutral again. Magnetic fields find themselves suddenly free to straighten out. That abrupt rebound is what produces the low frequency radiation.
"Theoretical arguments suggest that there are magnetic structures on scales as small as a kilometre or less," wrote Thomas. The filaments observed are typically 150 to 180 km wide, and their dark cores are less than 90 km wide.
D_Archer wrote:Such a bright flash for such a tiny object?
D_Archer wrote:I counted three distinct discharges, the large one first, then 2 smaller ones after. Seems like a pattern that repeats with most meteorites, 3.
Regards,
Daniel
dahlenaz wrote:Why do you use the word discharges? Are you speaking in an electrical sense?
D_Archer wrote:dahlenaz wrote:Why do you use the word discharges? Are you speaking in an electrical sense?
Because the bolide discharges and yes.
Regards,
Daniel
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