Meteors and coincidences

It seems as though everybody was watching the 150' asteroid, and nobody paying attention to the smaller boomer. One report claimed that the Russians had a little forewarning of it, but apparently not much. Or maybe they were surprised too; I can't read Russian and so there's no point in trying to track the sources.

Given that one came up from the south and the Russian one more or less down from the north, there doesn't seem to be any connection between the two. But there were a couple of other meteors streaking over California and Cuba. Such things aren't that uncommon: I've seen a fairly big one and I don't spend a lot of time watching the sky at night. I gather car-sized ones (the California one) hit us about once a week or so. Two in a night should happen at about the .5%-1% level, maybe better than that if the Cuba one was smaller.

But I'd really like to know where the other two radiated from. Eyeballing the California meteor suggests that it went more or less north--like the big one that missed. (I haven't located any direction for Cuba's.)

Over time small differences in position turn into big differences in orbit, so random chunks of asteroid, even if blasted off the same big one, will flail randomly around the sky in more or less in the same plane as the planets. But who else remembers Shoemaker-Levy?

The image gets clipped in Blogger. You may have to "View Image".

It broke up, and the fragments didn't have time to disperse widely, so Jupiter got a cosmic rat-a-tat-tat across its surface. They're still arguing whether the Silverpit crater was one of a set of impacts from a similar breakup hitting the Earth.

Maybe the new pair are related to the big boy that missed.

Or should I be suspicious? "Once is happenstance, Twice is coincidence, Three times is enemy action. -- Auric Goldfinger" Maybe the Martians want to collect on overdue parking tickets...