Question about asteroids/shooting stars. Can they cause power outages?

[GreekTTC]

Last night my friend and I were driving and saw what looked like an asteroid shooting straight down, then disappearing. Kinda neat, but I didn't think anything else of it. I didn't even get a good look, just caught it out of the corner of my eye.

 

This morning on a local radio station, all kinds of people were calling in saying they saw it, someone said they thought it was a UFO, one guy said he was on the phone while seeing it and his phone signal cut out, someone else said the power in their house went out as they were seeing it...and someone else said that it flew over Canada.

 

This was about 9:00-9:15pm, Halloween night, in Baltimore, Maryland.

 

I didn't know that this kind of phenomena could actually disrupt power and phone signals. Any truth to that, or were these people just reporting coincidences?

[Tormod]

Asteroids aren't shooting stars - they don't hit the earth like that (they would cause massive damage if they did). You're probably thinking about meteors.

 

To my knowledge they cannot disrupt power. They burn up in the atmosphere and usually don't even hit the ground.

[pgrmdave]

Thousands of meteors burn up in Earth's atmosphere all the time, so it is inevitable that at some point, a meteor will be seen when there are problems with the power. Just a coincedence.

[Turtle]

Actually, the US Naval Observatory regularly records the "sounds" of meteors using microwave RADAR. Spaceweather.com puts up a link usually during a meteor shower. Under the right circumstances it isn't unreasonable to expect some manner of electrical interference from a meteor.

___Just to clarify, a rock in space is a meteoroid while in space, a meteor as it comes into contact with an atmosphere & heats up so it is visible, & a meteorite if some part of it survives the descent & lands on terra firma. All asteroids are meteoroids, but not all meteoroids are asteroids; it's a matter of size in that regard (some might argue orbit also).

:confused: