The possibility of death heading at us from the sky is a very real one, and sometimes we get a reminder while just enjoying the stars. Earlier this year, a web camera for stargazing was installed on the Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i, and on July 14, viewers were able to see more than a dozen bright meteors streak through its field of view in just ten seconds! 

Clusters of bright meteors aren’t normal, not even during meteor showers, and this kind of light display is most likely associated with a broken-up space rock that had all of its pieces still pretty close together so that they hit the atmosphere as a pack. Discovery of these events is rare; you really have to have someone in just the right part of the world looking in just the right direction at the right time. It’s going to be interesting to see how many more of these clusters are detected.

Let’s hope no big clusters ever approach. The reason you don’t want to shatter an incoming asteroid is that that means more of our planet will get impacted as each chunk hits a new place on our rotating planet.

More Information

Subaru Telescope press release

University of Hawai’i press release