More musing on meteor

A UBC astronomy professor is shedding more light on the strange object that lit up the sky Monday night.

Brett Gladman says the meteor was spotted across British Columbia and into Alberta, Idaho, Montana and Washington state.

“You are not actually seeing the object, you are seeing atmosphere glowing around the passage of the object,” said Gladman. “This appears to be a standard bright meteoric bolide is the term we use for one of these meteors that has a bright burst near the end.”

The object would have likely been the size of a basketball or possibly a bit larger, and it was not the rock that was burning but the super-heated atmosphere lighting up as the rock plowed through it.

“It interacts with the atmosphere, and its passage makes the atmosphere heat up and glow because it is moving supersonically,” he said.

“It would have entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 20 or 30 kilometers per second."

It's believed the meteorite fell in a rugged, heavily forested area in the Kootenays.

Many witnesses thought the meteor was close to them, but actually its passage could have been hundreds of kilometres away.