A digital picture of a spectacular and apparently explosive event in the sky fooled a pair of seasoned NASA scientists, has other researchers around the globe mystified, and made a minor celebrity of a teenage photographer.
Jonathan Burnett, 15, was photographing his friends skateboarding in Pencoed, Wales when one of them noticed a colorful fireball in the sky. Burnett snapped a picture, then sent it to NASA scientists and asked if they knew what it was.
Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell, who run NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), posted the photograph on Oct. 1 and wrote that "a sofa-sized rock came hurtling into the nearby atmosphere of planet Earth and disintegrated." They called the picture "one of the more spectacular meteor images yet recorded."
A photo taken from about 10 miles away, by Julian Heywood, confirmed that Burnett's photo was legitimate and helped scientists decide the event had something to do with a jet contrail.
Problem is, it turns out, there was no meteor.
Rampant speculation
Meanwhile, the image and its caption made the Internet rounds and the story was picked up by the media. Interview requests for Jonathan came from the BBC and NBC, among others.
Semi-scientific discussions ensued as experts and amateurs debated the image in Internet and e-mail forums. Some initially labeled it a fraud. Others said it might be manmade space junk falling back to Earth, or maybe a military jet unloading fuel and igniting it with its afterburners.
During the discussion, the APOD scientists changed their caption, saying the picture likely had something to do with a jet contrail, a consensus that most other scientists had reached.
A second wider-angle picture, researchers learned, had been taken at the same time as the first photo. The second image, by Julian Heywood of Porthcawl, about 10 miles from Jonathan's location, helped form the contrail hypothesis and ruled out the idea that the first photo might have been fabricated.
Steve Salter, an aircraft engineer in the UK, suggested the contrail might have come from the Concorde, whose flight timing would have put it in the vicinity at the right time. Others deduced the same.
"I think the most likely explanation is that this is an unusual view of the Concorde's contrail," the APOD's Bonnell told SPACE.com late last week.
But nobody knows what generated the explosive appearance. It might just involve bright, reflected light rather than any sort of fiery reality.
Marco Langbroek of the Dutch Meteor Society thinks it could be what's known as a false Sun, when light from the setting Sun is refracted by the ice particles that make up a high-altitude contrail, which develops out of jet exhaust.
Better than a UFO
Adding to the confusion, the whole affair unfolded during a stretch of time when a host of real fireballs were generated by space rocks.
Five separate highly visible meteor events in one 8-day period in late September were mostly if not entirely unrelated, astronomers believe. In early September, the public was treated to a set of overblown stories about an asteroid that, for a time, had miniscule odds of hitting Earth in the distant future. So awareness was high, in the media and the public, when Jonathan Burnett's picture was first published.
While the photograph remains vexing, it is certain that everyone -- from the photographer to the mistaken NASA astronomers to the legions of other scientists and readers who followed the saga -- got an education.
"This will be well remembered by meteor and impact experts worldwide for some time I reckon," Langbroek wrote on CCNet, an electronic newsletter that moderated much of the discussion. He added that the whole affair has many lessons, chief among them that media and public awareness over the threat of rocks from space is growing.
"Clearly the UFO's of bygone days have given way to meteorite impacts as the popular explanation for strange celestial events with both public and press," Langbroek said.
Critical of NASA
Langbroek had harsh words for the APOD producers, who've been vetting and posting a picture a day for eight years. The pair has a loyal following and recently compiled their favorite images into a book.
"It is a bit worrying that apparently, within the team responsible for the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, nobody seems to have taken the care to contact an expert meteor astronomer first before declaring this publicly a certified 'daylight fireball' on their website," Langroek said. "NASA did not live up to its reputation" as "the major representative" for professional astronomers worldwide, he said.
Asked to respond, Bonnell said APOD has been "a constant learning experience" full of pleasant "and some not-so-pleasant" lessons.
"Of course, the bad press is disappointing," Bonnell said. "In the end it is a really exciting picture and I hope Jon Burnett is not too unhappy or discouraged that his image turned out to be of the Concorde contrail rather than a large meteor trail."
Jonathan just wants to know what's in the picture.
"We have lost count of the number of people who have emailed us with various explanations of what the picture could be of," Paul Burnett, Jonathan's father, told the BBC. He thought the matter rather funny. "A 15-year-old schoolboy has baffled scientists around the world with this picture."
Seeking a silver lining
Nemiroff, the co-producer of APOD, encouraged Jonathan in a private e-mail conversation to make the most of his experience.
"My final advice would be to write up a full report on what you have seen for school and keep a copy for yourself," Nemiroff suggested. "Ask your principal/headmaster/science teacher if you could receive some sort of special science credit for it. When writing up the report, try to discover for yourself what is the actual cause of the unusual cloud you photographed. Being a scientist is a lot like being an investigator."
Indeed. And the greatest mysteries are those that elude all manner of investigation.
By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET 13 October 2003
The Picture: Jonathan Burnett's photograph, which has scientists baffled.
A photo taken from about 10 miles away, by Julian Heywood, confirmed that Burnett's photo was legitimate and helped scientists decide the event had something to do with a jet contrail.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/m ... 31013.html
They didn't contact him through email before making their conclusion.