CLINTON, N.Y. — On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Rome, a large, white streak of light was seen flying through the air.
Adam Lark, a physics professor at Hamilton College and director of the Peters Observatory, said it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere.
Essentially, a meteor is a remnant of an asteroid or a comet.
“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.”
The explosion sent sonic booms throughout New England.
“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 something like 300 tons of TNT,” he said.
Lark said it’s rare for a meteor of its small size to explode like that.
“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.”
Lark said he sees meteor showers frequently from the observatory. Of course, their work goes beyond the atmosphere.
In connection to NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), Lark leads a team of students who help look for planets.
“We’re planet hunters, really,” he said.
They use ground telescopes to search around stars for surrounding planets.
“Feels like we’re kind of discovering something new and seeing something that no one’s seen before,” said Marcus Raabe, a rising junior at Hamilton College and a Physics major.
Marcus and another rising junior and Physics major, John Fitzgerald, will be spending late summer nights collecting data.
Fitzgerald said as someone who is new to the astronomy field, it’s a “crazy” feeling.
“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.
Lark said they have been a part of confirming planets for five years.