What Could Explain the Mysterious Beam of Plasma Seen in the Sky in 2017?

[despoi1er]

TL;DR Summary

I have realised this subject has been overlooked.

Basically, after seeing a meteor transit our atmosphere below 30,000 feet altitude too fast for my eyes to register yet leaving what looked like a beam of plasma from hanging from 1 side of the sky to the other for 3 seconds which I realized was a trail of smashed atoms of the atmosphere that got in the way of whatever it was I eventually came to the conclusion the only reasonable explanation was a splinter of neutronium thrown off at relativistic velocity by the final moments of a pair of neutron stars.

This transit I witnessed at about 4 am on 7th July 2017, near Falmouth in Cornwall, I later discovered by looking at a map had passed in an almost south to north direction and probably passed over very little other land which is why I have still not heard any other report of it or any insight into this subject. The direction puts it as wholly extra solar, not something accelerated in by our Sun, the velocity I calculated from the fact the whole trail just appeared in front of me I guessed it was faster than an animation frame at 25 FPS giving 1/25th of a second. The distance I had to guess at as 1000 miles for a straight line passing through the atmosphere within 30,000 feet of the ground giving a minimum velocity of 25,000 miles per Second! 1/10th the speed of light!

To not explode in our atmosphere at that speed it had to be something very hard or very dense! The same year we had all the news about gravity waves and neutron star mergers, that the 2 extinct solar cores merge at almost the speed of light but did anybody imagine they might release a ring of relativistic shrapnel? I also saw something about an asteroid vanishing into a cloud of dust around the same time.

The idea of something that fast, no matter what it's mass, exploding in our atmosphere or even hitting the ground has given me many nightmares since I saw this thing and also solves a few ancient mysteries like Sodom & Gomorrah and that city in India that shows signs of nuclear attack. We are in the path of this stuff, the time the pieces gets here is being varied by their varying velocities but even a piece of neutronium the size of a grain of sand at this kind of velocity hitting the ground would be biblical and without warning.

Please share this post and make the Astrophysics community aware of this idea, use my date & time to look for evidence of the passing of this thing, if it was big enough it would have had it's own gravity.

 

[Ibix]

Possibly related to this event, which was a grazing near-miss from a regular piece of space debris observed later the same day in Australia. It appears to have consisted of two fragments - perhaps there was a third?

Your concerns about neutron star fragments are unlikely. Neutron star matter can only exist inside the extreme gravitational environment of a neutron star. Any fragments would no longer be under pressure and would not retain their density. Also, the Earth is an incredibly tiny target at the distance at which the mergers to which you refer occurred. Very, very little material would reach us.

 

[Dale]

I eventually came to the conclusion the only reasonable explanation was a splinter of neutronium thrown off at relativistic velocity by the final moments of a pair of neutron stars

I think you must be using a different definition of "only" and "reasonable" than I use.

 

[despoi1er]

I think you must be using a different definition of "only" and "reasonable" than I use.

Please give me an alternative to explain something traveling so fast through our atmosphere it did not make any sound, any atom of atmosphere it came into contact with was smashed into sub-atomic particles instead which created the trail that hung there for 3 seconds before dissipating in a northerly direction like sparks fizzling out and doing so without exploding? Maybe not neutronium itself but a decompressed form. Or maybe at that velocity the mass is enough to maintain it's own gravity well, don't forget it will be experiencinjg time at a different rate to us! There is so much here nobody has ever even considered. This is why I need this explored by professionals.

 

[despoi1er]

Possibly related to this event, which was a grazing near-miss from a regular piece of space debris observed later the same day in Australia. It appears to have consisted of two fragments - perhaps there was a third?

Your concerns about neutron star fragments are unlikely. Neutron star matter can only exist inside the extreme gravitational environment of a neutron star. Any fragments would no longer be under pressure and would not retain their density. Also, the Earth is an incredibly tiny target at the distance at which the mergers to which you refer occurred. Very, very little material would reach us.

Yes I found that when I was looking for any reports of the thing I saw years ago and no, sorry but the velocity of the one in Australia, plus it's directionality were all wrong. What I saw came up through the plane of the solar system, south to North. It was no normal meteor.

 

[despoi1er]

And as for neutronium being restrained to the neutronium star environment, It was carried out by the gravity waves that allowed us to detect these mergers in the first place!

 

[despoi1er]

Please, think about the speeds involved in these collisions, close to the speed of light, at the moment of impact no matter how much gravity a neutron star has the centrifugal force will send splinters and fragments flying outwards. Add to that the very space around the merger being warped by waves of gravity rippling off the fusion of 2 gravity wells I think something is bound to escape entirely and if it is traveling at relativistic speed it is experiencing a very slowed down timeframe meaning it will take a lot longer for it to decompress it's structure, if it does so at all. Would relat8ivistic speed increase it's own gravity? I know gravity effects time, surely it works both ways?

I am happy to be ridiculed on this, I know it is something unheard of which is why I am trying to find someone qualified to theorise just what it was I saw properly. With my Amateur knowledge this explanation is the only thing that makes sense. I have spent 5 years thinking about this and I can think of nothing else that could travel so fast and survive such an atmospheric transit. It appeared as a Beam of plasma with both ends a vanishing point into space, it did not dip toward the horizon in the slightest and it appeared out of nothing while I was soaking up the view of the milky way that I had not seen in decades due to light pollution. The velocity alone narrows the possibilities down to not much else.

 

[phinds]

And as for neutronium being restrained to the neutronium star environment, It was carried out by the gravity waves that allowed us to detect these mergers in the first place!

HUH ? Gravity waves don't carry matter along with them. Gravity waves travel at c, matter does not, AND you are ignoring the fact that, as has already been explained to you, neutron star "fragments" would just be a bunch of neutrons not bound together. You really have some serious misunderstandings here.

 

[PeterDonis]

Please, think about the speeds involved in these collisions

Please think about the fact that your hand-waving estimate of how fast the object you saw was going could be way off.

I eventually came to the conclusion the only reasonable explanation was a splinter of neutronium thrown off at relativistic velocity by the final moments of a pair of neutron stars

Please think about the fact that your opinion about what is "the only reasonable explanation" of what you saw could also be way off.

Please share this post and make the Astrophysics community aware of this idea

You have this backwards. Before even trying to speculate on your own, you should be looking for what the astrophysics community already thinks about the event you saw.

But even leaving that aside, PF is not the place to try to make the astrophysics community "aware" of a personal speculation of yours. Personal speculations are off limits here.

This thread is now closed.