Eyewitness to a fireball
Deline resident watches bright object fall from sky
Kassina Ryder
Northern News Services
Monday, February 15, 2016
DELINE/FORT FRANKLIN
Danny Gaudet says he saw a fireball shoot through the sky and land somewhere across the lake near his home in Deline the morning of Feb. 8.
He was still in bed when he noticed a bright object in the sky at about 7:40 a.m.
"The curtain to my bedroom was wide open so I couldn't see the entire sky but all of a sudden in the corner of my eye this huge fireball was coming down from the sky," he said. "I've seen falling stars before, they're way out in space and they burn out even before they get close. So I don't know if it was a falling star, meteor or even just a satellite falling out of the sky, I don't know. It was bright and fairly close."
The object appeared to be so close, Gaudet said he believed it was going to crash right into the lake.
"I thought it would hit the ice, that's how close I thought it was," he said. "It didn't hit the ice so it's on the shore somewhere."
The object looked like a ball of fire with a long tail streaming behind it, Gaudet said.
"It happened so fast I didn't have time to take a picture or anything," he said.
Gaudet posted a description of the incident on his Facebook page. Residents in Rae and Wrigley responded saying they had seen something similar at around the same time that morning.
Peter Brown, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and a member of the Western Meteor Physics Group, said Gaudet could have seen a meteor.
"Particularly for brighter meteors, these will be things that could be a variety of colours, so blue orange, green are all common colours," he said. "It will have an extended tail or trail behind it and it will move across the sky pretty quickly. They typically only last in the order of a few seconds, five to 10 seconds at the most."
In some cases, the fireball's brightness can change as it shatters while entering Earth's atmosphere.
"If it fragments or breaks up, you might see sudden flares or sudden increases in brightness," Brown said.
"If it's particularly large, you may see even fragments, it looks like little sparks that fall behind it."
While most people never witness the event, fireballs containing meteorites take place all over the world on a daily basis, Brown said.
"There are many bright fireballs all over the world every day, people do see them. Even fireballs that drop meteorites occur fairly frequently, multiple times a day all over the globe," he said. "It's not unusual, but if you're outside a lot or if it's dark a lot, you might see them a little more frequently."
Brown said if someone found what they believed to be a meteorite, they can contact scientists at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary to help verify the find.
"Either of those institutions in western Canada, for example, could identify meteorites in the Arctic," he said.
