This mysterious fireball that exploded over Bangkok is a reminder: 100 tons of meteorites hit Earth everyday
The sky is falling! At least in Bangkok it seems to be doing so, with people in the Thai capital reporting a massive fireball exploding above the city on Monday. Several car dashboard cameras and others recording their travel around Bangkok's Khet Huai Khwang district saw the large fireball streaking across the sky before bursting into flames, at around 8:40 am.
The Bangkok Post reported authorities asserting that there were no indications of aircraft or helicopters crashing in the area and the videos suggest a reentry that might have been too fast for the object to be space debris. Satview.com, a website that tracks falling satellite debris, did show that a bit of space junk was expected to reenter the atmosphere around that time, although its tracker doesn't suggest it had fallen over Thailand.
As of now, the Bangkok Planetarium has also not recorded any reports of a meteorite landing, although the videos have yet to be fully examined. The fireball, however, is a useful reminder of something we rarely realise: tons of material hit the Earth's atmosphere everyday.
America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Science News publication said in 2011 that around 100 tons of meteroids, "fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks," enter the Earth's atmosphere everyday. Most of these are too small to notice and burn up quickly upon entering the atmosphere, but once in a while there's a relatively big one, like the massive asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia in 2013.
