What scientific data shows in this asteroid or comet impact video?

  • Context: High School 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Orion1
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Asteroid Comet
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
Sign up Log in
6 replies · 4K views
Orion1
Messages
961
Reaction score
3

Is this a video of a small asteroid or comet impacting Earth's atmosphere?

Exactly what kind of scientific data is being displayed in this video?

[/Color]
Reference:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9105627519592040246
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Discussion

Physics news on Phys.org
All I get is "error on page".
 
It works for me. There are several clips stuck together, but it doesn't say what we are looking at. I only see an anomaly in one and it is a false-color image of Earth with a bright light coming toward it. It is impossible to tell even what the video shows beyond that it is a stationary wireframe view of Earth from far above (thousands of miles) at high latitude, with one side (presumably in the sun) washed out white and the other side black. As this spot moves towards the earth, the Earth rotates quite a bit, so whatever it is, it would be moving pretty slow. Perhaps it is a simulation of something, but it doesn't look like much of anything to me.
 
I can view it now, it must have been down earlier.

The size of the object in the supposed UC Berkely clip is HUGE, it's so obviously faked.
 
I got the video once, but now all I get is "error on page". As to the specific question asked: "What kind of scientific data is being displayed?", Actually, I have no idea, and that's my answer to your question.

But that won't stop me from relating my impression of what I saw. There was a cresent shaped bright light with a superimposed grid and outlines of Earthly continents broadly suggesting that the crecent was in fact the Earth. I saw an object moving toward the crecent that in outline looked like the shell from a b-movie version of Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". Without any parallax information, I couldn't say whether the object was the size of a pencil erasor or the Moon, nor whether the object interacted with the Earth.

The rest of the page was about UFO's so I suppose there was an implication that this Verny object was a UFO (from my personal point of view, that's exactly what it was), not a comet or asteroid. And as Russ pointed out, it was going rather slow. I can't say that it rules them out, but I think it makes them rather unlikely. No matter what it was, if the scale of the object in the image was the same as the scale of the Earth, and if it hit the Earth's atmosphere at the speed indicated, I think the blast would have created effects that no one could fail to notice. Having failed to notice them myself, I'm ruling it out. Anything at your end?
 
Evo said:
I can view it now, it must have been down earlier.

The size of the object in the supposed UC Berkely clip is HUGE, it's so obviously faked.
I browsed through a number of the videos there. The ones of similar objects are typically pure light, meaning they just wash out a lot of pixels and you can't see the object itself. They have no size that can be measured even in pixels. In quite a lot of cases, they are specks of dust that fly past the camera (a number of these are space shuttle videos), extremely bright and out of focus.
 
russ_watters said:
I browsed through a number of the videos there. The ones of similar objects are typically pure light, meaning they just wash out a lot of pixels and you can't see the object itself. They have no size that can be measured even in pixels. In quite a lot of cases, they are specks of dust that fly past the camera (a number of these are space shuttle videos), extremely bright and out of focus.
That makes sense, I only looked for a second