17.09.2022
Members of the public captured the fireball shooting across the sky above Scotland
A fireball seen shooting through the skies from Scotland and Northern Ireland was a meteor, experts have said.
Hundreds of people reported seeing the "shooting star" across the UK skies at about 22:00 on Wednesday.
Scientists have used video footage captured by the public to work out whether the object was a meteor or space junk, and where it came from.
It would have landed in the sea south of the Hebrides if it reached Earth.
Space rock that enters Earth's atmosphere is called a meteor, but fragments that survive the journey to reach the ground are called meteorites.
Manmade objects left orbiting Earth - such as a satellite parts - are described as space junk. There are tens of thousands of pieces of space junk bigger than 10cm (4in) in orbit around the Earth and they can burn up like meteors as they enter the atmosphere.
The UK Meteor Network have now announced that the object, which was seen burning through the atmosphere for about 20 seconds, was "definitely a meteor".
Almost 800 witness reports from the UK and Ireland were recorded overnight.
The UK Meteor Network Network said the object came to a stop between 50km and 100km (31-62 miles) west of Islay.
"It came on an asteroidal orbit and entered the atmosphere at 14.2 km/s," the network tweeted. "The observed portion of the trajectory covered over 300km.
"If any meteorites did fall, they ended up in the ocean."
The expert group said it was "now 100% confident this was a small part of an asteroid".
Kevin Morgan, from UK Meteor Network, had earlier told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland the speed it was travelling at could indicate that it was space junk.
After questioning whether it could have been part of Elon Musk's SpaceX programme, the network of citizen scientists, tweeted: "We have checked the Starlink de-orbit and it would not have come anywhere near the UK.
"At this point we cannot find any known space junk or satellite de-orbit that could account for this fireball. We are looking at the data again."
The International Meteor Organization said the majority of witness reports were from Central Scotland but there were also sightings from the Black Isle and Kinnaber in the east, near Montrose and as far south as London.
Initial calculations showed the object was travelling NNE and could have landed in the Atlantic Ocean "south of the Hebrides".
'Something special'
Steve Owens, astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said the sighting was "incredible".
"I was sitting in my living room at exactly 22:00 and I saw out of the widow due south this brilliant fireball - this meteor - streaking across the sky," he said.
"I could tell it was something special. I could see through broken cloud that it was fragmenting - breaking apart with little bits coming off it.
"Normally if you see a meteor or a shooting star, they are just tiny little streaks of light lasting a fraction of a second but this one was streaking across the sky for at least 10 seconds, probably longer.
"It travelled from due south all the way across to the west. It was a pretty incredible sight."
He said it was unlikely, but not impossible, that it would have reached the ground, and may have reached the Atlantic Ocean.
Mr Owens said: "Normally these little shooting stars burn up and everything vanishes and evaporates in the atmosphere, but the thing last night was bigger than a little bit of dust which causes normal shooting stars.
"The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe even bigger than that.
James Williams saw it from his front garden in the southside of Glasgow and managed to record it on his mobile and his doorbell camera. He described it as being "all different colours like a firework but silent".
Danny Nell, 21, was walking his dog in Johnstone, just west of Paisley and Glasgow, when he saw the fireball.
"I was walking my dog and it was strangely enough 10pm on the dot and I just saw the flash in the sky and pulled out my phone and recorded it," he told the PA news agency.
"I thought it may be a firework at first because there was a lot of Scottish football on but quickly realised it wasn't and just grabbed my phone to see if I could catch it."
The UK Fireball Alliance announced on Thursday evening that the fireball was a "natural object".
Dr Aine O'Brien, from the University of Glasgow and a member of the alliance, urged people to report their sightings on their website.
She said: "Hopefully it was a meteorite and given how long it went for, maybe we've got the first Scottish meteorite in over 100 years."
Scientists will use the videos of the fireball to triangulate where it came from and track where it would have landed if it didn't burn up in the atmosphere, Dr O'Brien said.
She said it was not something to worry about.
"It's just a wonderful, beautiful thing. We getting shooting stars, meteors all the time."
Dr O'Brien added that it was just "lucky" that the weather conditions and the timing of the fireball meant many people could see it and record it.
Dr Marc Sarzi, head of research at the Armagh Planetarium, said the fireball was a "very spectacular one" but he did not think it was a "major event".
He said meteor showers made of little particles left behind by comets normally occurred over the summer.
If this fireball was caused by a meteor, it "would probably leave behind a nice piece of asteroid," he said.
Brilliant green meteor lights up the skies over United Kingdom
The best views came from Scotland, northern Ireland and the coast north of Manchester.
A green-tinged fireball lit up the skies over the United Kingdom late Wednesday (Sept. 14).
An incoming meteor (or bunch of space debris, which some experts say it may be) broke up between Scotland and northern Ireland within view of much of the United Kingdom, which has a population of nearly 70 million people.
More than 1,000 reports(opens in new tab) flowed in to the American Meteor Society despite the late hour, including a collection of photos and videos of the fireball event. Dozens of reports and videos also appeared on Twitter, as you can see below, from dashcams, doorbell cameras and mobile phones.
Related: Brilliant yellow-green fireball lights up sky above England (video, photos)
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One viewer joked that the universe was celebrating their newly minted Ph.D.
AMA's initial computer trajectory suggests the fireball first appeared north of Loch Ryan (roughly a two-hour drive southwest of Glasgow) and disappeared north of Islay Island, further north along the coast of the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom meteor network reported 800 viewings(opens in new tab) of the fireball in the early morning hours, adding their experts suspect it is space debris.
Given the length of the reported event, at 19 seconds, astronomer Will Gater said on Twitter also said he suspected the fireball might be a space debris event(opens in new tab). Jonathan McDowell, a debris observer based at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted(opens in new tab) it may be SpaceX Starlink satellite 4653, "but my estimate had it going a bit to the south of the U.K."
Gater also wrote an article for New Scientist(opens in new tab), and spoke with University of Glasgow planetary scientist Luke Daly; Daly, a member of the UK Fireball Alliance, said there is "a reasonably high chance that this is space junk" based on metrics such as its slower speed, "shallow entry angle [and] a substantial amount of fragmentation."
Regardless of the fireball's origin, the event was harmless as it took place dozens of miles (or kilometers) high in the atmosphere. No astronomical society has yet reported whether it generated meteorites, which rarely happen when a space rock naturally breaks up in the atmosphere and portions make it to the ground.
Quelle: SC