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“We can rule out a collision at the next closest approach with the Earth, but then the orbit will change in a way that is not fully predictable just now, so we cannot predict the behavior on a longer timescale,” Alberto Cellino of the Observatory of Turin in Italy told Astrowatch.net.

But how did a 135-pound meteorite make its way almost 100 miles over mountainous trails from Meteor Crater to Camp Verde without the use of wheeled conveyance or beasts of burden?

The long-lived fireball through Washington's sky was likely a meteor, but it didn't act like one.

In the last three years, a NASAsponsored team at the University of Colorado has developed a facility that allows “shooting stars” to be generated in laboratory conditions. The heart of this unique capability is a three-million-Volt electrostatic accelerator that is capable of accelerating small dust particles to velocities from 10- 70 km/s—roughly the range at which micrometeoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere and become “shooting stars.”

Astronomers have identified a weird pair of orbiting asteroids, called 288P, as the first known binary asteroid also classified as a comet.

The key to solving the puzzle was meteor showers.

(A) man walking through the area Wednesday told them he saw something–possibly a meteor–hit the side of the mountain while he was driving by the night before.

“He swears that something come out of the sky and hit the side of the mountain where the fire is,”

Its path suggests it couldn't have been trapped by the Solar System.