Karachi gets “fire balls” despite smoky, autumn skies

KARACHI: Yesterday, Karachi’s night sky lit up spectacularly as a meteor shower streaked across the horizon. The celestial display brought bright fireballs, which were timely and adeptly captured by the denizens on their cameras and smartphones. Videos, photographs and eyewitness accounts quickly started showing up on social media.

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Even though the shower was part of a common occurrence – NASA says earth gets around 300 tons of space debris every day – the glow and lights are a much less common phenomenon, over a smoke-covered city no less.

The “shooting stars” as they are called in common parlance are those space particles that are comparatively larger in size and when they enter the atmosphere, the chemical reactions with the earth’s air leads them to become visually striking.

These particles are moving around in space, when due to the pull of earth’s gravity they are brought closer to the ground. The friction often causes them to ignite and then based on the material of the particle itself, the fire shows distinguished colors.

From down here on the ground, they appear to be moving streaks of light. These lights are called meteors and the particles themselves are called meteorites.

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While most of these “fire balls” are practically harmless, if the particles exceed a certain size, they can pose a significant threat upon impact – to the site of collision and may even to the human race altogether. One such potential threat, a sizeable asteroid, is orbiting our home planet, with a possibility of collision in 2032. For now, the astronomers and international experts are of the opinion that the asteroid has changed its course away from us.