[meteorite-list] Loud boom over Westchester (N.Y.) might have been meteor

From: Mike Groetz <mpg444_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 17:00:02 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <564953.4010.qm_at_web33002.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

http://lohud.com/article/20090309/NEWS02/903090340/-1/newsfront

Loud boom over Westchester might have been meteor

Thane Grauel
The Journal News

The loud boom heard throughout southern Westchester early Saturday morning might have been a meteorite tearing through the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour.

What people said sounded like an explosion, thunderclap or a sonic boom was heard at 12:24 a.m. People from Scarsdale, Mount Vernon, Yonkers, Tuckahoe, Eastchester and Bronxville contacted The Journal News or police.

Though many people heard the window-rattling boom, solid explanations have been harder to come by.

But Liz Holland, who lives atop a ridge in Mount Kisco, said she happened to be looking out a south window around 12:30 a.m. and saw on the horizon a brilliant yellow object streaking through the sky in a downward arc.

"It was pretty bright," she said. "It wasn't huge, but bigger than a shooting star, like a thick piece of string."

She said she made a big wish, and had been telling friends about it since.

Bill Thys of the Rockland Astronomy Club wasn't watching the skies at the time.

"I wish I was," he said yesterday, adding that the description sounded like a meteor.

"Yellow's fairly typical," he said of a fireball, with different colors following in the train.

He said there was a very good chance it could account for the sonic boom because, "certainly, it was traveling fast enough."

A sonic boom occurs when something passes above the speed of sound - 761 mph. Thys said a meteorite's relative speed hitting Earth's atmosphere - at that time of night with a tangential trajectory - would have measured in the thousands of miles per hour.

Police departments in the area received numerous calls about the noise, but police could not determine its origin. Theories from people in the area ranged from explosions aboard a freight train to noise from a county helicopter. Others said it sounded like thunder, but the National Weather Service said there were no weather conditions that would account for such a sound.



      
Received on Mon 09 Mar 2009 08:00:02 PM PDT