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‘Brilliant fireball’ lighting up night sky over parts of UK is space debris, experts say | UK News


According to experts, a “glowing fireball” lighting up the night sky over many parts of England is space debris.

The UK Meteor Network has received more than 200 reports of “fireballs” being spotted in the night sky at around 9pm on Wednesday.

The organization said it has studied many videos of the incident, now there is an opinion that “this is space debris”.

It comes after people spotted the ball of light in the sky over parts of Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland.

The network says the preliminary orbit has been calculated by the International Meteor Organization and this “indicates that the object, which we believe to be space debris, has landed in the Atlantic Ocean south of the Hebrides”.

Danny Nell, 21, witnessed the meteor while walking his dog in Johnstone, west of Paisley and Glasgow.

He said: “I was walking the dog when it was strange that at 10 o’clock at night, I saw the flash of light in the sky and immediately took out my phone to record.

“At first I thought it might be a fireworks show because there were a lot of matches in Scotland but quickly realized it wasn’t and just grabbed my phone to see if I could catch it.”

Another eyewitness, Steve Owens, astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Center saw the meteor as it flew over Scotland on Wednesday night.

Mr Owens told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland: “It was unbelievable. I was sitting in my living room at exactly 10 o’clock last night and saw out my window, on the south side, this brilliant ball of fire, This meteor flew across the sky, and I could tell it was something special because I could see through the broken cloud.

“It couldn’t see perfectly; I could see that it was fragmenting, falling to pieces, there were small pieces coming out of it.

“And usually, if you see a meteor or a shooting star, they’re just tiny little streaks of light, they last for a fraction of a second, these streaks of light go across the sky for at least 10 seconds. – probably longer than that – and it moves from south to west, so it’s a pretty unbelievable sight.”

Mr Owens said it was “very unlikely” that the fireball landed in Scotland.

One space account tweeted in the early hours of Thursday morning: “Large meteor spotted burning over Scotland and Northern Ireland.”

Read more:
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Mr Owens also told BBC Radio Scotland: “Normally these little streaks of light, these little shooting stars, they all burn up and everything just dissipates and evaporates into the atmosphere, but what happened last night was even bigger. a little dust.

“Last night could have been the size of a golf ball or it could have been a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that, so it’s certainly not possible that debris could land.”

Meteor.  Photo: UKMON
Picture:
The meteorite flew over Scotland and Northern Ireland. Photo: UKMON

He continued: “The UK Meteor Network, which already has hundreds of reports from across Scotland and beyond, will be able to triangulate all of those reports to figure out its orbit.

“It looks to me like it’s heading… it’s definitely heading west and, given that the people in Northern Ireland are reporting it’s seeing it, it could have gone. over land and ended up in the Atlantic, but that’s certainly not impossible. it landed – finding it would be a challenge.”



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