Meteorite Crash In Canada Is Caught By Home Security Camera (smithsonianmag.com) 20
Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he'd been standing roughly two minutes earlier. What's more, his home security camera caught the impact on video -- capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet. The shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta on Monday.
"It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang," the homeowner, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press' Lyndsay Armstrong. Velaidum wasn't home to hear the sound in person, however. Last summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly noticed strange, star-shaped, grey debris in front of their house after returning from a walk with their dogs. They checked their security camera footage, and that's when they saw and heard it: a small rock plummeting through the sky and smashing into their walkway. It landed so quickly that the space rock itself is only visible in two of the video's frames.
"It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang," the homeowner, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press' Lyndsay Armstrong. Velaidum wasn't home to hear the sound in person, however. Last summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly noticed strange, star-shaped, grey debris in front of their house after returning from a walk with their dogs. They checked their security camera footage, and that's when they saw and heard it: a small rock plummeting through the sky and smashing into their walkway. It landed so quickly that the space rock itself is only visible in two of the video's frames.
Pretty small meteorite (Score:3)
Pretty small meteorite coming at a pretty wide angle from the sky compared to straight down. It probably slowed down enough to be at the maximum speed of a free falling object since it didn't even make a hole in the ground but seem to have bounced off the ceramic garden tile.
Still, I guess it's better to have been out of the way...
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Re:Pretty small meteorite (Score:5, Funny)
Had it killed you, the IQ of the world population would have gone up noticeably.
Re:Pretty small meteorite (Score:5, Funny)
Still, I guess it's better to have been out of the way...
Dont worry, it landed in Canada so it was apologized to profusely for the planet being in its way.
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I guess moving about 2 m/s or 6 ft/s or 200 km/h or 120 mph.
Sorry, 2 meters per frame or 6 ft per frame.
If there is another civilisation out there... (Score:1)
... even taking into account the sequence of improbably actions that led to us including wiping out dinosaurs etc, then when we basically did nothing impressive for a million years until farming was invented and technology would still have remained medieval to this day if a few geniuses hadn't bootstrapped the industrial revolution - then I suspect high power broadcast radio is a short term thing. Even today only ~100 years after its invention, over the air broadcasting is slowly giving way to internet base
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Unless we caught that exact moment another civilisation went through that period then we'll hear nothing.
100% this^. When you look at the details, the only signals we can rule out today is no one is broadcasting on wavelengths not normally encountered naturally in large amounts with the power of an entire large star and in our own galaxy. You would need to increase that power by the inverse square law to apply to far off communication like other galaxies. What civilization in their right mind would use the entire energy output of a star and then broadcast an ultra simple carrier signal and super simple enc
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Where's the kaboom? (Score:2)
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!
A meteor crashed and became a meteorite (Score:2)
Maybe videos like this will become more common (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the skydiver filming one going past? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I once thought something similar, but the object turned out to be my parachute. I walk with a limp.