Categories: MeteorsVideos

Persistent Train: Exploding Meteor Captured in New Timelapse

The Milky Way likes to amaze us, and this great video shot by Wes Eisenhauer outside of Custer, South Dakota, shows an amazing exploding meteor and what is known as a persistent train from the fireball. The “remains” of the fireball persisted for several minutes (just a few seconds in the timelapse) and upper atmosphere wind shear twisted and swirled the expanding debris.

This was shot on October 16th, 2014, before the official start of the Orionid meteor shower, so this was perhaps a random larger meteor streaking through the sky.

Phil Plait has a good explaination of persistent trains:

Technically, that’s called a persistent train, and it’s not actually smoke. As a meteoroid (the actual solid chunk of material) blasts through the air, it ionizes the gases, stripping electrons from their parent atoms. As the electrons slowly recombine with the atoms, they emit light — this is how neon signs glow, as well as giant star-forming nebulae in space. The upper-level winds blowing that high (upwards of 100 km/60 miles) create the twisting, fantastic shapes in the train. The actual details of how this works in meteor trains are not well understood, mainly because they are so difficult to spot and study. It’s hard to point a telescope at a position in the sky when you don’t know where or when a meteor will pass through!

We featured another persistent train video in August 2013, and ended up adding quite a few other images of “explody” meteors captured by astrophotographers.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

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