NASA has published a map of the appearance of fireballs in the atmosphere of the Earth

Despite the fairly frequent use of the term "car" in the scientific and popular scientific literature, there is no official definition of this concept. In any case, there is no such definition in the International Astronomical Union. By the above link to the wiki, the “car” is defined as a meteor with a brightness of at least −4m (brighter than the planet Venus), or having noticeable angular dimensions.

NASA has a similar definition for the term "car"; the agency's experts call this a very bright meteor, a consequence of small asteroids burning almost completely in the Earth’s atmosphere. So, the other day NASA experts published a map of the appearance of fireballs in the atmosphere of the Earth, from 1994 to 2013.

The map shows all the cars for almost 20 years. In total, they counted 556. The largest was a car from Chelyabinsk. It was formed as a result of a fairly large asteroid hitting the Earth’s atmosphere (at NASA this cosmic body is called an asteroid).
')


On the map, blue dots show fireballs that appeared at night for a particular region, and orange ones - fireballs that appeared during the daytime. The size of the point is proportional to the amount of emitted light energy (measured in gigadjoules). The size of the objects displayed on the map - from 1 to 20 meters. Smaller objects were not taken into account, large in size has not yet been (which is good news).

The map itself is designed to visualize the distribution of large space bodies that have fallen to Earth over the past two decades. This helps to better assess the danger that may threaten our planet. The map was created within the framework of the NASA project, the purpose of which is to identify potentially dangerous space objects for us.

Via nasa