(Photo: Matthew Dominick on X)
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captured a rare green explosion over 250 miles above Earth from the ISS.
- Dominick shared the footage of the mysterious event on social media, seeking help identifying the explosion.
- Friends of Dominick suggested the flash could be a bolide, a bright meteor that explodes in Earth’s atmosphere.
A NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) recently captured a rare astronomical event over 250 miles above Earth. Matthew Dominick, who is currently stationed on the ISS, revealed that he recorded a green explosion in space and shared the footage with some friends to gather opinions. He then took to social media to seek help identifying the explosion.
“They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere,” Dominick wrote in a post on X, talking about the reaction of his friends. He added they though the flash might be a bolide – an exceptionally luminous meteor that explodes upon entering Earth’s atmosphere
These types of meteors, sometimes called fireballs, are so bright that they can be observed over vast areas. However, what distinguishes a bolide from a fireball is its explosive nature. The video captured by Dominick clearly shows the meteor streaking through the sky before erupting.
In his X post, Dominick explained, “I was greedy with the ISO settings because I wanted to capture the Milky Way Core. When I reviewed the shots later, I found the bolide.” He also shared two videos of the explosion, the first one, a slow-motion timelapse that shows the explosion frame-by-frame; and the second one, a faster version that captured the meteor’s rapid descent and burst.
When a meteor enters the atmosphere, the frictional force causes it to slow down and heat up simultaneously, creating a “bow shock” – a shock wave formed in front of the meteor as it moves at supersonic speeds towards the earth. The heat and pressure generated by the bow shock eventually cause the meteor to break apart. These are relatively rare phenomena, which makes Dominick’s capture even more remarkable.
Dominick has been on the ISS since March, serving as the commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission. He was filming a timelapse of Earth as the ISS passed over North Africa when he captured the explosion, just after the ISS flew over Cairo, Egypt. Over the past few months, he has shared numerous other photos and videos from space.
Get Latest News Live on Times Now along with Breaking News and Top Headlines from World, Web Stories and around the world.
