A Fireball That Exploded Over Canada Has Been Traced to a Very Unexpected Origin

The planet is being bombarded from space. On a daily basis, dust, pebbles, and chunks of rock fall into our atmosphere, sometimes burning up in a blazing streak across the sky.

These fireballs are larger pieces of asteroids or comets that broke off from their parent bodies and fell into Earth's gravity well.

Scientists have determined that the fireball that exploded over Canada last year is not a typical meteorite. The object was traced all the way through the Solar System to a starting point in the Oort Cloud.

Material from the Oort Cloud can be thrown towards the Sun. This one exploded in a way that said it was made of rock, not the frozen ammonia, methane, and water we would expect from an Oort Cloud object.

The discovery suggests that our understanding of the Oort Cloud could be improved.

"This discovery supports an entirely different model of the formation of the Solar System, one which backs the idea that significant amounts of rocky material co-exist with icy objects within the Oort Cloud," said physicist Denis Vida of the University of Western Ontario.

The result is not explained by the current models. It's a big change.

The visitors from the Oort Cloud are very cold. They are comets that take hundreds to tens of millions of years to travel around the Sun at random inclinations.

They're thought to have been kicked out of the Oort Cloud between 2000 and 100,000 units from the Sun.

Scientists have a good idea of what comets have in common because a lot of them have been identified.

On February 22, 2021, a fireball streaked across the sky over the northern part of Canada. Satellites and two Global Fireball Observatory cameras were used to observe and record it.

Scientists were able to see the object's trajectory and disintegration with the help of the cameras. Fireballs are thought to heat up and explode when atmospheric gases get into cracks in the rock and cause it to explode.

The object was around 4 inches across and weighed around 2 kilograms. It was thought to have fallen deeper into the atmosphere than any ice object has ever been seen to fall into. It was very similar to a rocky fireball.

When the researchers used the data to calculate its inbound trajectory, they found it to be in line with the path of a comet.

This is one of the strangest fireball observations ever made. Five years ago, the Global Fireball Observatory widened the "fishing net" to 5 million square kilometers of skies, bringing together scientific experts from around the world.

It allows us to find and study precious meteorites, but it is the only way to have a chance of catching rare events that are essential to understanding our Solar System.

The Karltejn fireball, which fell over Czechia in 1997, was identified by the researchers as one of the three Oort Cloud meteorites.

The Oort Cloud is thought to hold primordial material from the formation of the Solar System. The next step is to figure out how the objects ended up here.

We want to know how this rocky meteorite ended up so far away. The better we understand the conditions in which the solar system was formed, the better we understand what was necessary to spark life.

The early moments of the Solar System were so important that we want to paint a picture that is accurate.

The research was published in a journal.