Peter Brown
The Western University scientist who uses cameras, radar and infrasound to track fireballs and work out where meteorites come from.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Canadian
- Field
- Meteor physicist
Peter G. Brown is a professor of physics and astronomy at Western University in London, Ontario, and one of the leading experts on how meteoroids behave as they enter the atmosphere.
His group runs networks of all-sky cameras across southern Ontario that record fireballs every clear night, as well as a powerful meteor radar that detects tiny meteors even in daylight. From these records they calculate the orbits of meteoroids and work out how often bodies of different sizes hit the Earth.
Brown is also an expert on infrasound, sound waves too low for humans to hear, which travel thousands of kilometres through the atmosphere. Large fireballs make infrasound, and so do nuclear tests, so monitoring stations built to detect test explosions also record meteoroids exploding in the air. Brown used these records to estimate the energy of the Chelyabinsk airburst in 2013, equal to roughly 500,000 tonnes of TNT, and to show that bodies of that size strike more often than once thought.
When a meteorite landed on Ruth Hamilton's pillow in Golden, British Columbia, in 2021, Brown and his colleagues studied it and reconstructed its orbit from camera records of the fireball. His work helps turn eyewitness reports, videos and instrument records into science.