Did Earth encounter pieces of an alien visitor yesterday? - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Last night, Earth apparently encountered pieces of an alien visitor, according to scientists. It seems tiny pieces of Comet Hartley 2 may have presented a spectacular and startling sky show across the country yesterday. NASA meteor experts had predicted it was a long shot, but the evenings of November 2nd and 3rd might display a meteor shower from dust, which puffed off this visiting comet as it passed within twelve million miles of Earth. And indeed, the Center for Astrophysics has collected several sightings of bright meteors called fireballs, which result when comet dust burns up in Earth's atmosphere. Helga Cabral in Seascape, reported, "I saw bright white ball and tail, arcing towards the ocean. It was quite beautiful and it looked like it was headed out to sea and so picture perfect it could have been a movie!" Three thousand miles away just north of Boston , Eresa Witham witnessed a similar cosmic event. "I was in the Revere area about 7:15 last night, driving north on Route 1, when a brilliant object with a tail passed in front of me-very similar in appearance to a shooting star but it appeared much lower to the Earth than a typical shooting star would be. If it weren't for the fact that I had my daughter with me, I'd begin to believe I'd imagined it." Comet Hartley 2 has put on quite a nice show for amateur astronomers over the past few weeks, sporting a vivid green coma or halo around it and a golden auburn tail of dust. NASA's Deep Impact/EPOXI probe will present dramatic close-up images of the comet when it zooms past the nucleus on November 4th.