Strange light blocks in the American sky

A bright block flew through many parts of the US state of Texas and New Mexico earlier last week.

The fireball (smaller dot above) appears in Thomas Ashcraft's infrared camera. (Photo: Space).

Space said that the light block appeared around 11pm on September 21 local time and it could be a meteorite. It flew about 23 seconds and then disappeared.

Thomas Ashcraft - astronomer working at the space observatory near the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico state - recorded the scene of the mass of sky with an infrared camera. That evening he heard a loud sound from a distance. Ashcraft initially thought it was thunder, but he immediately rejected the thought because there were no storms that day. He then checked the video in the station camera and saw the light block.

"The object flew at a relatively low speed, so I thought it was cosmic garbage or part of the artificial satellite that fell to the ground. But after carefully analyzing the image, I thought it might be a meteorite. "Ashcraft said.

The infrared camera that Ashcraft uses to burn fireballs is owned by Sandia National Laboratory. Designed to track the sky at night, it can detect all light blocks within a radius of 563 km. In some cases this camera can record sounds from flying objects.

" If we listen carefully, we will detect some sounds when watching the video about this fireball, although it is only very small sounds ," he said.