[meteorite-list] Fireball meteors emit unique radio wave signals

From: Shawn Alan <shawnalan_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 10:15:33 -0700
Message-ID: <20140604101533.e8713c95af9984a493c5db01816d4c10.18b415ad00.wbe_at_email22.secureserver.net>

Listers,
Now we will be able to listen to meteors with out AM/FM radios....
:)

Down below is a cool article about how scientist are about to pick up
radio signatures from meteors burning up in the atmosphere from the
plasma on the meteor.

S

Shawn Alan
IMCA 1633
ebay store http://www.ebay.com/sch/imca1633nyc/m.html
Website http://meteoritefalls.com


Fireball meteors emit unique radio wave signals
15:37 03 June 2014 by Jessica Orwig

After 50 years of trying, physicists have tuned in to the radio waves
emitted by fireballs streaking through Earth's atmosphere.

A meteor with a tail as bright, or brighter, than Venus is known as a
fireball ? the Chelyabinsk meteor that broke apart over Russia early
last year is an example. At its brightest, the Chelyabinsk fireball
appeared brighter than the sun.

Fireballs ionise nearby air as they barrel through Earth's atmosphere,
generating a super-bright plasma trail. In 1958, Gerald Hawkins, then at
Boston University, predicted that this plasma should produce radio waves
as it cools. But hunts for these radio emissions were inconclusive at
best.

Now we know that Hawkins was right. Kenneth Obenberger at the University
of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues were searching for
mysterious events called radio bursts in data from the Long Wavelength
Array, an observatory in New Mexico. Radio bursts show up as points of
radiation in images. But to the team's surprise, analysis of 11,000
hours of data included evidence of 10 low-frequency radio bursts that
appeared smudged across the sky.

Meteor radio

The shapes of the smudges were reminiscent of fireballs streaming
through the sky. So the team looked at data from a NASA survey telescope
that records meteors and that scans some of the same parts of the sky as
the radio array. Each of the elongated radio events correlated in time
and space with known fireballs, says Obenberger.

"It's the first detection that is believable because it's based on
imaging," says Peter Jenniskens at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames
Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "It's a new way of
looking at meteors."

The team still needs to work out the exact physical mechanism that
causes fireballs to emit these specific low-frequency signals. Solving
the puzzle could help improve our understanding of other mysterious
events that create plasmas in Earth's atmosphere, such as lightning
strikes and ball lightning, says David Meisel, executive director of the
American Meteor Society in Geneseo, New York.

Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal Letters, DOI:
10.1088/2041-8205/788/2/L26

Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25667-fireball-meteors-emit-unique-radio-wave-signals.html#.U49TN2dOW01
Received on Wed 04 Jun 2014 01:15:33 PM PDT