100 full moons: Blazing fireball lights up Arctic sky (AP)
By JAN M. OLSEN
Yesterday
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — A blazing fireball lit up the dark skies of Arctic Finland for five seconds, giving off what scientists said was “the glow of 100 full moons” and igniting hurried attempts to find the reported meteorite.
Finnish experts were scrambling to calculate its trajectory and find where it landed, according to Tomas Kohout of the University of Helsinki’s physics department, who said Thursday night’s fireball “seems to have been one of the brightest ones.”
It produced a blast wave that felt like an explosion about 6:40 p.m. and could also be seen in northern Norway and in Russia’s Kola peninsula, he told The Associated Press on Saturday.
It might have weighed about 100 kilograms (220 pounds), according to Nikolai Kruglikov of Yekaterinburg’s Urals Federal University.
“We believe it didn’t disintegrate but reached a remote corner of Finland,” Kohout said, adding that any search plans for the meteorite must face the fact that “right now we don’t have much daylight” — four hours, to be precise.
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