Camera footage from Scotland shows that a meteor exploded over the country at night, lighting up the skies.
Police received many calls from people who had reportedly seen a “fireball” in the night sky, the BBC reports.
The meteor was estimated to be only 4 inches wide, according to Keith Horne, a professor of astronomy at St. Andrews University.
“What you’ve seen is a piece of rock from outer space that has crashed into the earth,” Horne told the BBC. “When it hits the atmosphere it starts to burn up... It releases all this energy into the atmosphere which will cause a bright flash and sometimes bits of this explode.”
Much bigger fireballs routinely burn up in the planet’s atmosphere, but most of them go unnoticed because they fly over uninhabited areas.
