Residents of Tokyo, Japan were surprised early Thursday morning when the skies welcomed an explosive extraterrestrial object with a sonic boom. The explosion was with about 165 tons of TNT, Global News reported.
Is doomsday near?
Videos of the spectacle, and phenomenon showed bright hues of green and purple lights flying across the skies for just about seconds before the light shattered.
One of the locals who witnessed the event said, "I thought a person living (in the condo) above knocked down a shelf."
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The impact of the explosion appeared and felt like a tiny asteroid colliding with air as picked by with infrasound monitoring stations set up across the globe, which the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization oversees, the report added.
According to the International Meteor Organization, the meteoroid or the spectacle in the skies was seen from the large area of Japan's Kanto region.
Official blog posts from the IMO stated, "We were able to calculate a source energy of the entering asteroid of about (165 tons or 150 metric tonnes) of TNT."
Now, these could have been risky, challenging the last century's World War atomic explosion. The organization estimated that the space rock could be at approximately five feet in diameter with a massive 1.8 tons. To compare, this meteoroid that went to explode over Russia in 2013 and blew out thousands of windows at Chelyabinsk city was about 20 times more massive however.
These fireballs are common astronomical occurrences, but they can create a sonic boom more so if it passes over large cities worldwide. However, these are rare events.
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Other astronomy news
Meanwhile, in other space news. The lunar eclipse during the weekend was watched by millions of people around the globe.
"When stars like our own Sun, a yellow dwarf star, run out of fuel, they turn into a white dwarf. In fact, 90 percent of all stars in the universe end up as white dwarf stars," Passant Rabie wrote on Inverse.
Rabie referred to a study published Monday in the Nature Astronomy Journal suggesting that white dwarf stars are the main sources of the Milky Way's carbon atoms, a crucial life's chemical element.
In the Universe, there are stars that explode as supernova and then transform into a neutron star or blackhole, while most of the stars turn into white dwarfs, which is a basic form. Nevertheless, a new study showed that these white dwarfs may contribute tons in life more than what was previously believed.
The report added, "The scientists behind the new study used observations of white dwarfs in open star clusters, groups of a few thousand stars formed around the same time, in the Milky Way by the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii in 2018."
Speculations whether a doomsday is happening, or whether the fireball was a sign of doomsday went around the news. However, astronomers are making it clear that this is far from happening.
