Abstract
DETONATING METEOR IN MESSINA.—On Monday evening, April 10, at 7 p.m., people at Messina noticed a brilliant illumination of the sky, succeeded in about three minutes by four loud explosions like artillery discharges. The idea was that one of the ammunition magazines in a fort had exploded, but telegraphic despatches from Palermo, Catania, and Reggio di Calabria announce that a similar phenomenon had been remarked there, and that it had its derivation from a large bolide or some other meteoric disturbance. The interval of three minutes between the flash and sounds show that the disruption of the fireball occurred at a distance of about forty miles from the observer at Messina. More information is awaited. At other stations the object may have approached much nearer, if it did not, indeed, shower some of its disintegrated fragments to the ground. April 10 is a rather special date for large fireballs; it has furnished many fine specimens in past years.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 86, 223 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1038/086223a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/086223a0