Just before dawn on 22 February 2021, a fireball lit up the skies across Alberta, Canada. Although the object hailed from a conglomeration of comets at the edge of the Solar System, it wasn’t a comet, researchers now say.
Just before dawn on 22 February 2021, a fireball lit up the skies across Canada’s Alberta province when a 2-kilogram space rock vaporized as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere. Although the object hailed from the Oort Cloud—a conglomeration of comets at the edge of the Solar System—it wasn’t a comet, researchers now say. Data collected during its fall suggest the object was made of rock rather than ice and behaved more like an asteroid.
First proposed by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950, the Oort Cloud is a spherical halo of comets that stretches out halfway to Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s nearest neighbor, well beyond the view of even the largest telescopes. “Everything we know about it is indirect,” says Denis Vida, a meteor astronomer at Western University who led the new study.
Despite its provenance, the object was distinctly uncometlike. Most cometary fireballs are fragile; they fragment and burn up high in Earth’s atmosphere. But this object, plunging at 62 kilometers per second, penetrated much deeper, Vida says, suggesting it was tough and rocky rather than icy. It also broke up in two phases at two discrete pressures–mirroring the breakup of a common kind of asteroid that drops meteorites to Earth.
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