WATCH | Meteor Shower In Maharashtra? Lights In Sky Witnessed In Nagpur, Other Cities

Known as ‘shooting stars’ meteors appear as trails of blazing light cutting across the sky. Meteors are basically bits of rocks and ice which enter the Earth’s atmosphere at tremendously high speed.

New Delhi: People in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh were taken by surprise when an luminous trail cutting across the sky in what appeared to be a meteor shower was spotted on Saturday.  

The sightings appeared over the sky of Nagpur in Maharashtra and Jhabua and Barwani districts in Madhya Pradesh.

 

Watch the video here 

Often known as ‘shooting stars’ meteors appear as trails of blazing light cutting across the sky. Meteors are basically bits of rocks and ice which enter the Earth’s atmosphere at tremendously high speed. The Earth, during its revolution around the sun, passes through a band of dusty regions in space where tiny rocky objects enter the Earth’s atmosphere with a speed range of 30 to 60 kilometres per second. 

As per NASA, approximately 30 meteor showers occur each year which are visible to observers on Earth with some of these showers being around longer than a hundred years. For example, the Perseid meteor shower, which occurs each year in August, was first observed about 2000 years ago and recorded in the Chinese annals. 

A meteor that reaches the ground is called a meteorite.

Lonar lake in Maharashtra’s Buldhana district was formed by a meteorite collision impact during the Pleistocene Epoch. With a depth of 137 metres, the lake is a national geo-heritage monument and one of the four known hyper-velocity basaltic impact structures. The other three are in southern Brazil.