'Fireball' streaks across early-morning sky


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SALT LAKE CITY — Rob Lentz was in the final stretch of his trucking route heading east across the Bonneville Salt Flats early Thursday when something outside made him sit up straight in his seat.

"All of a sudden, this thing just lit up the entire top of my hood and the desert," Lentz said. "I thought maybe an airplane had flown over or a helicopter, and I was in somebody's spotlight."

What he actually saw was a meteor flying across the southeast portion of the sky. The meteor was sighted about 4:40 a.m. in multiple areas of the Wasatch Front, including Wendover, Ogden and Vernal.

"I looked out the passenger windshield, and this bugger was big," Lentz recalled. "If you were to hold a pencil out at arm's length, it was literally that wide running across the sky, just as emerald green as you could think.

"It actually was bright enough streaking across the sky that it gave definition to the roadside across the salt flats," he said. "It was amazing."

Other reports said the meteor broke apart mid-flight and burned in pieces.

Kyle Dawson, assistant professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Utah, said the brilliant light was caused by a mass of rock moving through the Earth's atmosphere in excess of 20,000 mph.

"The faster you move, the faster you're slamming into air particles, so that causes it to heat up," Dawson said. "It's moving so fast that the friction with the air causes it to basically melt and burn as it comes through the atmosphere."

Most meteors, however, are about the size of a grain of sand and are not as spectacular.

"When you see a shooting star, you're just seeing a small speck coming through the Earth's atmosphere," he said. "But you can see those every single night. If it's something worth mentioning, it's got to be much bigger than that."

Marjorie Chan, a professor at the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the U., said meteorites collected from meteors that have reached the Earth's surface are rare and can be difficult for the untrained eye to identify.

"They're different from a lot of the rocks that we have on Earth, especially the ones that are iron- and nickel-rich," Chan said. "People will probably be out looking for (them) because they actually can be pretty valuable."

What was most valuable to Lentz, however, was the light show he got from his truck in the early hours of Thursday morning.

"I've been trucking for 37 years and I've seen zillions of little shooting stars running across the country," he said. "But this was far and away the largest thing I've ever seen." streaked across the sky in 2009.

Contributing: Mary Richards

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