Second fireball in two days blazes across the Atlantic Canada sky

The sky is falling over Atlantic Canada, apparently.

Just one day after Maritimers spotted a bright fireball flashing across their predawn sky on Tuesday, a second fireball was spotted this morning. A NovaScotiaWebcams' view, looking over Halifax Harbour (above), caught the meteor as it streaked through the sky, and it was also seen by several witnesses.

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As is usual these days, Twitter became the true source for the breaking news, as CBC News reporter Phonse Jessome shared his own sighting with the Internet:

Other witnesses that spoke to CBC News reported similar sightings, saying that it lasted up to around seven seconds, headed roughly to the north and at least one confirmed what Jessome had said about it breaking up into pieces before disappearing.

One witness, Stephen Lukas, who was on his morning jog at the time he saw it, told CBC News that he saw something similar on Monday morning as well.

So, is something going on in the skies over Nova Scotia these days? Is this space junk falling from orbit?

Astronomer David Lane, from Saint Mary's University in Halifax, told CBC News that the fireball seen yesterday morning was most likely a "chuck of rock from space," or a meteoroid. Given that the number of these chucks of rock floating out there far outnumbers the pieces of space junk we've left floating around our planet, chances are that he's right.

Nova Scotia Webcams released this time-lapse video of Tuesday morning's fireball:

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However, does the fact that at least two of these fireballs flashed through the sky, at roughly the same time, going roughly in the same direction, on two consecutive days point to something else going on here? Well, it might.

It wouldn't necessarily be from some larger space rock — an asteroid — regardless of the 'close-calls' we've had lately. Even in a day, Earth moves over 2.5 million kilometres along its orbit. So, if these fireballs were heralding the arrival of some larger object, they would have to be staggered by quite a bit to pull that off, so much so that the chances of them being related would likely be pretty slim. Space junk is a possibility, as there's plenty of it floating around up in orbit, and a lot of it seems to have a south-to-north orbit (watch when the video zooms in closer to the planet).

However, for an object to burn as brightly as these fireballs, it would have to be a fair-sized piece of debris, very likely something big enough to track. Also, a satellite or other piece of space junk would tend to break up in many pieces as it burned through the atmosphere, since the many different components that go into these pieces of junk would strip off and burn up. So, with no specific news about any particular object falling from space, and this fireball only breaking up into a few pieces, it's still looking like we're seeing a meteoroid here.

(Image courtesy: NovaScotiaWebams.com)

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