Meteoro. Phenomenon observed "from the French coast to the south of the Algarve"
Geophysicist Rui Gonçalves reported that two of the four AllSky7 network cameras in Portugal recorded the meteor seen on Saturday in Portugal, but said it was premature to say whether it fell and where.
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The professor of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar stressed, in statements to the Lusa agency, the need to "gather more data" to be able to calculate the trajectory.
Flash was a meteoroid at 161 thousand km/h. And, after all, it never reached the ground (Portuguese version)
According to the researcher, the phenomenon was observed "from the French coast to the south of the Algarve".
Although he reinforced that it is now necessary to cross-reference data, and that this work is not immediate, he added that Spanish members of the network, a country where there is more equipment and a greater possibility of making records with a clear sky, estimate that from the meteor "almost nothing fell, or it ended up in the Atlantic", according to preliminary data from the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics.
In Portugal, in the Tomar chamber "the record is very good", in São Brás de Alportel it only captured "the beginning of the event" and in Braga and Sesimbra the sky was cloudy and only the flash can be seen, without an image.
"Only after calculating the trajectory can we have any idea if any material was left over and what the crash site is, but that is not automatic", stressed the geophysicist.
In Portugal, the passage of the "gigantic bolide", with "long duration and long trail", was observed at 11:46 pm on Saturday.
According to the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics, in Spain, an organization with which the geophysicist has already spoken, the meteor entered the atmosphere at a speed of 161 thousand kilometers per hour.
According to the same institution, the initial altitude of the luminous part of the event was recorded at 122 kilometers and it stopped being seen at an altitude of 54 kilometers, but Rui Gonçalves explained that this does not mean that it disintegrated at that time.
"They can shine up to 30/40 kilometers in altitude. Normally, from there down you can't see it, it's called dark flight. This has to be calculated, and this part is more difficult to calculate, because we have to make a series of assumptions to calculate the place where the pieces may have fallen", added the researcher, in statements to the Lusa agency.
Today, also, the researcher from the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and the University of Coimbra Nuno Peixinho stated that the meteor seen on Saturday night is a normal phenomenon in Portugal, although rare of this dimension, and usually these rocks vaporize in the atmosphere and "may not have fallen anything whole of reasonable size".
Nuno Peixinho recalled that there is a network of cameras in Portugal and Spain, activated automatically, to record these phenomena and that, by cross-referencing this data, it is possible to understand whether or not it fell and calculate, with some margin of error, the location.
"They are pieces of rock that come at high altitude and speed, between 10 and 70 kilometers per second", explained Nuno Peixinho, in statements to the Lusa agency.
The researcher also explained that, like shooting stars - although these are much smaller - they are consumed in the atmosphere and it is from this chemical process that the trail of light that is seen results, which in the case of blue "indicates that the type of material that is burning, vaporizing, is magnesium".
"As they travel at several kilometers per second, against the air, the pressure that it exerts on the atmosphere is so great that the temperatures easily reach 25 thousand degrees, and at that temperature everything vaporizes", he stressed.
Nuno Peixinho stressed that, "as they teach in school, if it fell to the ground it is a meteorite, if it did not fall it is a meteor".
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