Meteors: Friend or Foe?

by Drew Primps

At approximately 12:25 AM on Saturday, residents of the greater Bronxville area were suddenly jolted by a resounding boom. The noise was loud enough to arouse the concern of several Bronxville students; many of whom could be heard debating the details of the sonic occurrence in class on Monday.

Recent news coverage has revealed the potential cause of Bronxville’s big bang: the sonic boom of a meteor careening through the earth’s atmosphere. The term sonic boom, usually associated with supersonic jets, refers to the loud explosion noise emitted when an object exceeds the speed of sound. This puts the meteor’s minimum velocity at 761 mph, though a meteor traveling under those conditions would likely have exceeded 1,000 mph, reported LoHud.com.

When presented with this startling news, area student Jack Manley was quick to react. “It really irks me to see that these politicos down in Washington are so eager to give our hard earned cash to Wall Street, meanwhile we honest hard-working people are being barraged with meteors, and no one’s giving us any help.”

President Obama could not be reached for comment on the asteroid situation.

Concern and outrage were the most common responses to the news, as many were reminded of the role of meteors in the extinction of dinosaurs, an event that has long tarnished the meteor’s name.

SFL President Justice Kibbe took the Asteroid to task, pledging “the creation of a 24-hour meteor observatory on the hilltop” to prevent future attacks in a statement released earlier this afternoon. President Kibbe went on to explain, “there’s totally enough space up there… I’m bringing it up in the next SFL meeting.”

Meteor enthusiast Kayalyn Kibbe voiced conflicting opinions on the subject: “On the one hand, we are living in a technological age and we should have the technology to detect these meteors so that I can go outside and watch them.” Ms. Kibbe was simultaneously suspicious of the meteors, articulating a fear that “they threaten our moral fiber and our value system.”

Whatever its true character, this meteor chose to make itself heard only in Bronxville, for reasons that we may never know.