{"id":680033,"date":"2026-06-02T15:15:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/680033\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T15:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:15:19","slug":"meteor-explosion-caught-on-camera-in-rome-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/680033\/","title":{"rendered":"Meteor Explosion Caught on Camera in Rome | News"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Meteor<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

CLINTON, N.Y. — On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Rome, a large, white streak of light was seen flying through the air.<\/p>\n

Adam Lark, a physics professor at Hamilton College and director of the Peters Observatory, said it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Essentially, a meteor is a remnant of an asteroid or a comet.<\/p>\n

“The debris from them will enter our atmosphere, and when that happens, we see a meteor,” Lark said. “When you see a streak of light, you’re seeing a chunk of rock and maybe metals burning up in our atmosphere.”<\/p>\n

The explosion sent sonic booms throughout New England.<\/p>\n

“If they’re large enough, they can actually make it a good chunk of the way through the atmosphere, and the atmosphere will basically blow them up\u2014something like 300 tons of TNT,” he said.<\/p>\n

Lark said it’s rare for a meteor of its small size to explode like that.<\/p>\n

“This is not an uncommon thing,” he said. “The uncommon part was how big it was that it could make such a big boom and a big streak across the atmosphere.”<\/p>\n

Lark said he sees meteor showers frequently from the observatory. Of course, their work goes beyond the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

In connection to NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), Lark leads a team of students who help look for planets.<\/p>\n

“We’re planet hunters, really,” he said.<\/p>\n

They use ground telescopes to search around stars for surrounding planets.<\/p>\n

“Feels like we’re kind of discovering something new and seeing something that no one’s seen before,” said Marcus Raabe, a junior at Hamilton College and a physics major.<\/p>\n

Marcus and another rising junior and physics major, John Fitzgerald, will be spending late summer nights collecting data.<\/p>\n

Fitzgerald said as someone who is new to the astronomy field, it’s a “crazy” feeling.<\/p>\n

“It feels like I’m kind of reaching out of my element here, but being part of a national project where we can actually find real data and find real planets and exoplanets and look at these stars, it’s really cool,” he said.<\/p>\n

Lark said they have been a part of confirming planets for five years.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Rome, a large, white streak of light was seen flying through the air.<\/p>\n


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