Bolide
A bolide is a very bright fireball, often one that explodes or breaks apart in the sky.
Bolide comes from a Greek word for a thrown missile. Astronomers use it for an exceptionally bright fireball, and especially for one that bursts or fragments with flashes along its path. There is no single strict rule for how bright a bolide must be; some scientists use the word for any fireball, while others keep it for the very brightest, so it is best thought of as a description rather than an exact category.
Bolides matter because the meteoroids that cause them are big enough for pieces to reach the ground. On 9 October 1992 a bolide crossed the eastern United States and was filmed by many people at evening football games. One fragment, a stone of about 12 kilograms, smashed through the boot of a parked car in Peekskill, New York. It is an ordinary chondrite of type H6.
You can recognise a bolide by its brilliance, by a trail that may glow for seconds afterwards, and by breakup into several glowing pieces. A boom heard a few minutes later is a sign that something survived low into the atmosphere.
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Level: Explorer Ages 10 and up