Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A meteoric flash or flare created when a meteoroid explodes or vaporizes as it passes through Earth's atmosphere.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A brilliant meteor.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A kind of meteor; a bolis.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any
extraterrestrial body that collides with Earth - noun An extremely bright
meteor - noun A
fireball
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an especially luminous meteor (sometimes exploding)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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"There's a very good chance it was what we call a bolide, which is a meteorite crossing the sky at extremely quick velocity -- very, very fast -- and as it hits the atmosphere at about
CTV News RSS Feed 2008
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"There's a very good chance it was what we call a bolide, which is a meteorite crossing the sky at extremely quick velocity -- very, very fast -- and as it hits the atmosphere at about
CTV News RSS Feed 2008
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The satellites, it turned out, were also quite good at detecting the explosions - the official term is "bolide" - of meteorites like that over Tunguska.
Wired Top Stories David Axe 2010
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The fireball – also called a bolide – created a dusty tail upon entering the atmosphere of the Earth.
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When an airbursting asteroid, called a bolide, exploded over an island region of Indonesia late last year, it rocked the residents' world with an estimated energy release of about 50
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But experts told The Daily Telegraph that the meteor, estimated to be the size of a football and travelling from east to west, was a "bolide" or "super fireball".
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2010
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But experts told The Daily Telegraph that the meteor, estimated to be the size of a football and travelling from east to west, was a "bolide" or "super fireball".
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2010
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If we're lucky we'll get a moderately sized bolide impact in the next decade which hopefully will bring people to their senses.
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The military thought that it was most likely a bolide?
UFO files from National Archive allow believers to revisit 'Welsh Roswell' 2010
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The K/T (Cretaceous/Tertiary) boundary not only marks the disappearance of dinosaurs and 70 percent of the other species but has a distinct iridium layer discovered by Luis and Walter Alvarez, suggesting an extraterrestrial bolide.
The Anthropocene 2010
fbharjo commented on the word bolide
bolide ball of fire (meteor)
January 30, 2007
treeseed commented on the word bolide
The word bolide comes from the Greek βολις, (bolis) which can mean a missile or to flash. The IAU has no official definition of bolide and generally considers the term synonymous with fireball. The term is more often used among geologists than astronomers where it means a very large impactor. For example, the USGS uses the term to mean a generic large crater forming projectile "to imply that we do not know the precise nature of the impacting body ... whether it is a rocky or metallic asteroid, or an icy comet, for example". Astronomers tend to use the term to mean an exceptionally bright fireball, particularly one that explodes (sometimes called a detonating fireball).
_Wikipedia
February 24, 2008
qms commented on the word bolide
She thought she could star if she tried
And see her name shining worldwide
But her star, though bright
Only flickered a night
A striking but short-lived bolide.
May 30, 2019
stuartmathergibson commented on the word bolide
Bolide (bOlId)
A meteoric flash or flare created when a meteoroid explodes or vaporizes as it passes through Earth's atmosphere.
May 19, 2022