This Fireball Ignored the Solar System's One-Way Signs
It’s not unusual for meteors to illuminate night skies over southwestern Australia’s desolate landscapes. But the fireball of July 7, 2017, was different. For a full minute and a half, it just kept burning and burning and burning. The object carved a trace of light as wide across as Texas, then faded.
Many meteors disintegrate in our atmosphere, or slow down and crash into the soil. But after its light show, this one kept going, departing our planet with a celestial “thanks, but no thanks.”
Next stop: Jupiter, at the beginning of 2025. And after tangling with that giant planet’s gravity, it will most likely be ejected into interstellar space, said Patrick Shober, a graduate student at Curtin University in Western Australia who led a team that studied the event.
The July 2017 event is known as a grazing fireball, a rare type of meteoroid that hits Earth’s atmosphere at a low angle, then skims like a skipping stone on a lake.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/science/fireball-meteor-australia.html
