Cosmic Blast Rattles Indonesia

Back on October 8th, something big lit up the late-morning sky (at about 3:00 Universal Time) over the island nation of Indonesia.

I first learned of this event three days later, when few details were known. A smattering of news reports described an extremely bright daytime bolide that exploded high above the town of Bone in the province of South Sulawesi. One television station showed amateur video of a tortured smoke train lingering in the sky, and unconfirmed reports suggest that a 9-year-old child died of cardiac arrest from the thunderous air show.

Since then, however, impact specialists have been quietly working behind the scenes to try to determine how much punch this cosmic interloper packed. According to a preliminary analysis released October 20th by Elizabeth Silber and Peter Brown (University of Western Ontario), the sky really was falling that day. The blast registered as extremely low-frequency atmospheric waves at 11 of the infrasound stations maintained worldwide by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

Silber and Brown note that the high-altitude explosion was centered at 4½°S, 120°E, but it's been challenging to gauge the kinetic-energy punch it delivered. The most likely estimate is equivalent to some 40,000 tons of TNT, about three times the energy of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. If that value is correct, this was the most powerful meteoric blast since 1994, when a "mini-Tunguska," nearly as bright as the Sun, exploded over the tiny Pacific island of Kosrae. Brown and others estimate that events like this should occur about once per decade.

Something this obvious would not have escaped the notice of various defense satellites, because these cosmic intrusions look much like nuclear weapons exploding high in the atmosphere. (Here's a list of previous airbursts picked up by the U.S. military's "orbital assets" and made public afterward.)

It'd take a chunk of asteroid about 20 to 30 feet (5 to 10 meters) across to deliver a 40-kiloton wallop. But no one has yet claimed to have found any meteorites, according to Thomas Djamaluddin, a government scientist who's been monitoring the situation. Odds are that any surviving fragments fell into offshore waters.