Meteor

“ It kept that form for perhaps two minutes, when it began to lengthen upwards, and grow wavy and zigzag in outline from the action of the wind, and gradually diminishing in breadth, until it became a fine, faint spiral line, at its upper end dissolving into the fast-gathering clouds the meteor seemed to have evoked. ”

“ There can be no doubt that the plunge of a meteor into the sun's atmosphere with the terrific velocity which it will necessarily acquire in consequence of the attraction of the sun, is accompanied by the transformation of the energy of the meteor's movement into light and heat. The quantity of energy that a meteor thus carries with it is so vast that it is hardly credible until the figures which express it and the grounds on which they are based have received due attention. ”

“ Aloft, in the emptiness of space, there is no air to impede its flight. It may have been moving round and round the sun for thousands, perhaps for millions of years, without suffering any interference; but the supreme moment arrives, and the meteor perishes in a streak of splendour.
In the course of its wanderings the body comes near the earth, and within a few hundred miles of its surface begins to encounter the upper surface of the atmosphere with which the earth is enclosed. To a body moving with the appalling velocity of a meteor, a plunge into the atmosphere is usually fatal. ”

“ Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the shipmaster looked up, and saw one of those meteors that are known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the out-houses, an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within. ”

“ Even without any wind they diffused themselves throughout the meteor’s atmosphere, it was so small a world, with so thin a blanket of air about it—an infinitesimal fraction of the air that envelopes your Earth. ”

“ The luminous meteor-tracks are in the upper part of the earth's atmosphere. Few, if any, appear at a height greater than one hundred miles, and few are seen below a height of thirty miles from the earth's surface, except in rare cases, when stones and irons fall to the ground. All these meteor-tracks are caused by bodies which come into the air from without.
2. The velocities of the meteors in the air are comparable with that of the earth in its orbit about the sun. ”

“ The speed of the meteor is checked by the resistance which the atmosphere offers to its motion, and the energy represented by that speed is transformed into heat, which in less than a second raises the meteor and the surrounding air to incandescence, melts the meteor either wholly or in part, and usually destroys its identity, leaving only an impalpable dust, which cools off as it settles slowly through the lower atmosphere to the ground. ”

“ If the process went on for long the meteor would be all dissipated in vapour, and in any case it must reach the earth considerably reduced in size.
Numbers and numbers of comparatively small ones disappear, and for every one that manages to come to earth there must be hundreds seen only as shooting stars, which vanish and 'leave not a wrack behind.' When a meteor is seen to fall it is traced, and, whenever possible, it is found and placed in a museum. Men have sometimes come across large masses of stone and iron with their surfaces fused with heat. ”

“ A meteor can fall at any old time, day or night, though we only see them shooting after dark sets in. When one of these fragments of fused metal and slag does rush toward the earth and bury itself in the ground, it makes just such a brilliant flash. Some say there is a fearful crash when it strikes. Stranger things have happened, I take it, Bud, than to believe that was a falling meteor of a pretty good size."
"But don't shooting stars generally fall in the summer time, Hugh?" questioned Bud. ”

“ If it come to an aerolite or mass of metallic rock, or even a cloudlet of gas, standing still in space, its contact with our air evolves 600,000° of heat. And when the meteor comes toward the world twenty-six miles a second, the heat would become proportionally greater if the meteor could abide it, and not be consumed in fervent heat. It vanishes almost as soon as seen. If there were meteoric masses enough lying in our path, our sky would blaze with myriads of flashes of light. Enough have been seen to enable a person to read by them at night. ”

“ For our purpose, we need not go into all the interesting but complicated details. Our experiment with the pencil shows that if a meteor was close by, like a blinding bolt of lightning, then, as seen by a pair of observers separated by only a few blocks, the meteor would show a large parallax. But if this meteor was as far away as the stars, it would show no parallax at all, no matter how widely the pair of observers were separated on the earth. ”

“ Because the particles that make a meteor shower are moving through space along parallel paths as they come into the earth’s atmosphere, the meteors all seem to shoot out from a single small area in the sky. ”

“ The original entrance velocity, angle of entry, size, and chemical structure all influence the shape of a meteor’s path and its time of survival. The apparent angle of descent as seen by the observer depends on the distance and the direction the object is moving relative to the observer. When the meteor travels parallel to the observer’s line of sight, it seems much slower than when it passes the line of sight at right angles. ”

“ METEORITE, a mass of mineral matter which has reached the earth’s surface from outer space. Observation teaches that the fall of a meteorite is often preceded by the flight of a fireball (see Meteor) through the sky, and by one or more loud detonations. It was inferred by Chladni (1794) that the fireball and the detonations result from the quick passage of the meteorite through the earth’s atmosphere. ”

“ Yes, siree, that must have been a big meteor stone."
"Then it struck the earth right close to our camp, mark me," vowed Jud.
"Ain't I glad it didn't pick out this spot to drop on," crowed Nuthin. "Whew! guess we'd have been squashed flatter than that pancake you hear about."
"What are meteors made up of—they drop from stars; don't they?" asked Bob Tice.
"Oh! there's just millions and billions of 'em flying around loose," said Phil Towns, who liked to read of astronomy at times. "Lots of 'em happen to get caught in the envelope of air that surrounds the earth. ”

“ The greater the distance between the observer and the meteor, the slower its apparent motion [V-13] .
Some meteors move very slowly; traveling at an almost leisurely rate, they soar through the sky on a long, level path almost parallel with the earth. The slow fireballs in the great meteor procession of 1913 maintained a horizontal course over a distance of several thousand miles, from western Canada to Brazil [V-14] . ”

“ Even before we reached it we saw pieces of meteoric iron scattered about, seeming to bear out the theory of our scientists that the meteor struck here, exploded, and blasted the hole into which it fell, leaving the great rim of upturned earth two hundred feet high that constitutes the mound. ”

“ We have a series of tubes here filled with specimens of various gases, and when we pass a current through them you will see their different beautiful colours.
There is one other way in which we learn about the upper air, and that is through those meteors, which you saw on one of the balloon slides. A meteor, or, as it is often called, a shooting star, is a bright light like a star that darts across the sky; but it has nothing to do with stars; it is only a piece of stone or metal. Here are some meteors and fragments of meteors ”

“ In thus rapidly penetrating the air heat is generated, the meteor becomes incandescent, and the phenomena of the streak or train is produced. Before the object can pierce the dense lower strata of air its material is usually exhausted, but on rare occasions it withstands the fiery ordeal, and fragments of the original mass fall upon the earth.
Multitudes of meteors infest space. On a clear moonless night one person may count eight or ten shooting stars in an hour. ”

“ But sometimes it must occur that a meteor does not get past the junction without coming so close to the earth that it plunges into the air, often producing a noise and generating a streak of light like a shooting star. ”

“ Some meteors, however, are too big to get burnt up. They come right through the air and bury themselves in the ground, as you remember the leaden ball buried itself when Galileo dropped it from the roof. I hope you will never have the ill-luck to be hit by a meteor, for it would hurt much worse than any bullet. ”

“ On an average, however, the individual bodies of a meteor swarm are very small, being represented by "a cloud of silver dimes each about 250 miles from its nearest neighbor." The smaller and lighter meteors called shooting stars which are consumed in our atmosphere probably number from 10 to 20 million daily. ”

“ No one claims that the meteors of the star-showers, nor that their accompanying comets, came from the earth's volcanoes. To ascribe a terrestrial origin to meteorites is, then, to deny the relationship of the shooting-star and the stone-meteor. Every reason for their likeness is an argument against the terrestrial origin of the stones. ”

“ Persons in the track of the meteor saw a brilliant circular disk of white light, surrounded by an orange to greenish halo, the dim light of which was constantly traversed by narrow bands of brilliant white, running from the central disk in irregularly-curved lines toward the circumference. As this body, increasing in brilliancy and apparent magnitude, was rapidly approaching, both men and animals were overcome with fear. ”

“ How are we going to fix 'em on a reflected wave when they're more powerful on their own hook? The whole plate is glaring white. And, incidentally, so is the celestial globe in the meteor-spotter. I've had the threshold cut to the devil on that or we'd never be able to hold this course. Anything like a meteor that comes in our way now will not register until we're right on top of it and—"
The Relay Girl lurched sickeningly. ”

“ The majority of the meteors we observe represent the heat-induced “evaporation” of exceedingly small fragments of cosmic matter. The smallest meteor-forming bodies reach the surface of the earth only as the finest of dust particles or as microscopic droplets of solidified meteorite melt.
These residues descend slowly through the atmosphere and may be carried for great distances. Afterwards, they may be found scattered so widely and uniformly on the ground that their presence in any given locality cannot be accounted for by the fall of any specific meteorite. ”

“ The apparent velocity of the meteors is between ten and forty-five miles a second, and their average height is about seventy-six miles at first appearance, and fifty-one miles at disappearance. Occasionally a meteor is so large and compact as to escape total destruction, and falls to the earth. ”

“ There can be no doubt that Chiles and Whitted misinterpreted the appearance of an unusually brilliant meteor, its body glowing to white (the momentarily persisting luminous train of a meteor often has a veined or fibrous structure that could easily have suggested the “lighted window” and “cockpit”) and blue incandescence (the glowing “undercarriage”) as it rushed through the atmosphere some fifty miles or more away, shooting off flaming gases (the “exhaust”) 113 and vaporizing from the friction of the atmosphere. ”

“ Now I think this meteor swarm whizzes round so close to the Sun's surface that some of the meteors actually graze the surface and make the sunspots. The swarm is collected mostly at one part of the track, like a lot of people running a race; but if it is a long race, such as a mile, we have seen some of the runners get far behind the leaders, sometimes a whole lap behind. ”

“ The entire top of the meteor was a twisted, fire-blasted mass of bronze-like metal. Where the tower had been, where the shaft had led into the remarkable interplanetary vehicle, there was now a broken expanse of thoque that flashed fire under the rays of the sun. ”

“ But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth. To be sure, meteors have no kind of natural connection with thunderstorms; they may fall anywhere and at any time ”

“ Meteorites, the name for meteors which have actually gone all the way through our atmosphere, are never regular in form or spherical. As a rule the iron meteorites are covered with pittings or thumb marks, due probably to the resistance and impact of the little columns of air which impede its progress, together with the unequal condition and fusibility of their surface material. The work done by the atmosphere in suddenly checking the meteor's velocity appears in considerable part as heat, fusing the exterior to incandescence. ”

“ We have met with outbursts upon stars sometimes of sufficient violence to shoot off part of their substance. We have found the gaseous portion sweeping through space like a net, and the vapors that accompanied it condensed into spatters that have consolidated into meteorites. We have seen this system traveling through boundless space, with nothing near it except an occasional solitary meteor, and we have seen it in the long lapse of ages slowly augmenting its cluster of these little strangers. ”