Majestix won’t get worried any time soon. But the brave chief of the stubborn Gaulish village in the Asterix novels is afraid of something: that the sky will fall on his head. If Majestix were living in Germany these days, there would probably be deep worry lines on his face: After a roughly one meter large cosmic debris burned up near Berlin on the night of January 21st and a search party tracked down some fragments in Brandenburg a few days later, Last Saturday around 5:29 p.m. a bright fireball again left its trace across the sky, this time in the south of the Republic.
The International Meteor Organization registered 346 observations by Tuesday, most from Bavaria and Austria. There were also reports from the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia, among others. “The trajectory of the intruder from space was very flat from east to west,” says Dieter Heinlein, who runs the Bavarian Meteorite Lab in Augsburg. This event with the number 529-2024 was not a normal shooting star, such as one often sees flashing across the firmament. Because most meteors shine much fainter. “This is due to the size of the particles, which are usually only the size of dust grains and are sometimes only a fraction of a millimeter in size,” says the physicist and astronomer.
Chunks with a diameter of a few centimeters or meters, on the other hand, appear in the sky as bright fireballs or bolides. The object that recently fell near Berlin was larger than the one on Saturday and was therefore no longer a meteoroid, but a small asteroid. In fact, the Earth is under constant fire because a large number of natural projectiles from space are constantly raining down on it. At certain times they appear in swarms, such as the Perseids in August or the Geminids in mid-December. Then you can observe a particularly large number of shooting stars.
And all meteors or fireballs shine according to the same principle: the more or less large celestial bodies hit the atmosphere at high speed and, through the friction on the air particles, create a so-called plasma channel along the flight path at an altitude of around 80 to 100 kilometers. This leads to atomic processes that ultimately emit radiation. The rapid burning of the particle due to the frictional heat, on the other hand, contributes very little to the luminous effect.
Eyewitness reports are usually not enough to find out details about the trajectory, speed or mass of a meteoroid – especially since some contradict each other. Therefore, Heinlein and his colleagues rely on technical aids, especially special cameras. At Germany’s initiative, the European fireball network AllSky 7 was installed in 2018. Today, a few dozen video cameras in twenty European countries as well as in the USA and New Zealand monitor the sky at each location day and night. This equipment should also help further decipher event 529-2024.
The researchers have apparently already solved one of the puzzles. The observations of eyewitnesses and cameras consistently show that the meteoroid broke into two or more pieces shortly before the tracer went out. Experts were already speculating about whether these chunks survived the fiery ride through the atmosphere and fell to the ground as meteorites – perhaps even within Bavaria, like the famous “Neuschwanstein” meteorite did in April 2002. Now Pavel Spurny from the Czech Ondřejov Observatory has discovered that all the material appears to have been ground up in the air. So heaven did not fall to earth. Majestix the Gaul would breathe a sigh of relief.