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Meteor explosion recorded over Oslo Fjord area

Astronomers were fending off scores of calls on Friday from Norwegians who reported hearing what experts are calling a meteor explosion over southeast Norway, somewhere over the Oslo Fjord area.

NORSAR, in Kjeller, has registered a signal from the explosion. Officials at NORSAR and at the University of Oslo said there likely are remnants of the meteor lying on the ground between Gardermoen to the northeast of Oslo and Askim to the southeast.

"I urge people to search for particles that may have fallen to earth," astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no. He said the stones would be black and magnetic.

Seismologist Johannes Schweitzer was on duty at NORSAR Friday morning, when the meteor is believed to have exploded around 10:15am.

He said he got a signal from one of NORSAR's stations about 10 minutes after the explosion. "That correlates to information we have had from astronomers," he said. He thinks the meteor explosion was probably somewhat less forceful than the one recorded at NORSAR stations on June 7 in northern Norway.

Calls streamed in all day from Strømstad, Sweden in the south to Notodden and Jessheim in the north, placed by people who heard the explosion or saw a flash streaking through the bright blue sky Friday morning.

It was said to have been travelling in a north, northwest direction.

"This sounds extremely exciting," said astronomer Kaare Aksnes of the astro-physics institute at the University of Oslo.

He received a call from Stein Kjetil Overrein in Halden, near the Swedish border, who reported seeing a flash hurtling through the sky, and hearing an explosion minutes later. After calling the police, he called Aksnes.

E-mailed reports of the incident were also streaming in to the university from all over the Oslo area.

It's at least the second meteor incident in Norway in recent weeks. A meteorite was photographed streaking through the light night sky east of Tromsø on June 7, and last week a resident of Stavanger reported finding a meteorite in his yard. The latter report, however, hasn't been confirmed and may have been a hoax.

posted by ... @ 11:51 AM