In addition to claims that the strange explosion is a harbinger of a cataclysmic onslaught of killer asteroids that will end the world as we know it on September 23, other people have theorized that the fireball was part of a satellite burning up upon reentry into earth’s atmosphere, or even a UFO.
But the Sydney Morning Herald reports Thailand’s Astronomical Society has concluded the explosion was a phenomenon known as a bolide, or exploding meteor. According to NASA, “US government assets recorded at least 556 bolide events of various energies” between 1994 and 2013.
What made Monday’s event, which occurred at around 8:40 a.m. in the Bangkok suburb of Nonthaburi, so unusual was the brightness of the blast and the fact that it was seen during the daytime.
“This is a natural, normal phenomenon because small meteors fall to earth every day but what we saw was similar to one over Chelyabinsk in Russia two years ago,” Prapee Wiraporn, president of the Thai Astronomical Society, told reporters, referring to the February 2013 event in which a 10,000-ton (9,072 metric ton) meteor narrowly missed the Russian city of 1.2 million inhabitants. More than 1,000 people were injured, and the force of the explosion was 30 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.
Monday’s bolide blast was captured in many photos and videos.
“It was the middle of a blue sky day and there was a quick, bright light coming down,” satellite engineer Porjai Jaturongkhakun, who caught the event on his dashboard camera while commuting to work, told Agence France-Presse. “I usually see shooting stars at night but I have never seen one in the day before.”
NASA says there is nothing to worry about this month; the earth is not going to end and there is only about a 0.01 percent chance of a dangerous asteroid striking our planet in the next 100 years. Addressing rumors, speculation, and predictions—almost all of the Internet variety—that an earth-ending asteroid will collide with the planet this month, Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s near-Earth object office in California, said that “there is no scientific basis—not one shred of evidence—that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact earth” later this month.
“If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now,” Chodas told the Guardian.
