Reports from various countries, including Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern parts of England, documented witnesses seeing a fireball cross the sky on Wednesday night.
According to Aine O’Brien, a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow and a member of the UK Fireball Alliance, it was unclear, at first, whether the fireball was a meteor or space debris.
Numerous videos were posted on Twitter and YouTube by people who witnessed the sighting. The fireball remained visible in the sky for about 20 seconds, which is unusual for a meteor. How the object broke up in the sky seemed to suggest that it was a space rock, not a meteor.
O’Brien said that the fireball seemed like a meteor in some ways and a space rock in other ways. The UK Fireball Alliance processed the footage and worked on the fireball’s trajectory. Even though people could only guess what it was, it was a fantastic experience.
O’Brien said that most fireballs are visible for only a few seconds. An example is a meteorite that hit a driveway in Central England in 2021 and fell through the sky for seven seconds. The meteorite was discovered in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. The London Natural History Museum reported that the rock weighed 10.6 ounces and was the first meteorite to be found in the UK in over 30 years. It was also the first known carbonaceous chondrite ever found in the country. Scientific meteorite analysis indicated that the object fell from the outer region of the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.
The new exciting fireball was seen on Wednesday at around 10 p.m. local time. O’Brien said that because it was relatively early and the sky was already dark, it was easy for many people to see it, even those in urban areas like Glasgow. Many people who were lucky enough to see it recorded and shared videos from their phones and door cameras on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other social media sites. Most tweets sent by observers showed how excited they were to have witnessed the phenomenon. One tweeter said that she couldn’t believe she had seen it and managed to record it.
The founder of the UK Meteor Observation Network, Richard Kacerek, said that the network’s initial assessment was that it was a piece of space debris, perhaps coming from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite program. He said that from the videos shared, the fireball seemed to be moving slower than a meteor. That idea was later rejected.
The president of the International Meteor Organization, Cis Verbeeck, said that the organization had received close to a thousand reports of the fireball sighting on its website. He said the organization’s scientists had used the information submitted to compile a possible fireball trajectory.
The possible trajectory compiled suggested that the fireball had passed over the North Channel, which separates Northern Ireland and Scotland, and ended its journey on an island off the west coast of Scotland called Islay. A tweet by Charles Lister suggested the same.
After analyzing the data, the UK Meteor Network determined the sighting was a meteor. John Maclean, an astronomer at the network, said: “We’ve analyzed it from many more angles. It is definitely a meteor. Probably a small piece of an asteroid that’s broken off an asteroid. It came in at an asteroidal orbit.”
