A fireball seen shooting through the skies above northern parts of the UK on Wednesday evening was a meteor, experts from the UK Meteor Network have concluded.
The network said it had received nearly 800 reports mainly from Northern Ireland and Scotland after a fireball was spotted at about 10 p.m. local time.
It said on Twitter that the object, which lasted more than 20 seconds, travelled northwest and passed directly over Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.
Scientists used video footage taken from members of the public and analysed data to work out whether the “brilliant fireball” was debris or matter from outer space.
The network had earlier suspected that the blazing object was space junk, but said it could not “find any known space junk or satellite de-orbit that could account for this fireball.”
The experts concluded late Thursday that the blazing space matter was “definitely a meteor,” adding “we are now 100 percent confident this was a small part of an asteroid.”
The network said the end of the meteor’s journey was not observed on camera, but that it ended over the North Atlantic Ocean, some 50–100 km west of the Isle of Islay, the southern-most island of the Inner Hebrides.
‘Incredible’
According to the International Meteor Organization, the majority of witness reports were from the central parts of Scotland.Danny Nell, 21, was walking his dog in Johnstone, near Glasgow, when he saw the fireball.
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.”
Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, saw the fireball as it passed over.
He told BBC Radio that he could tell it was “something special” because he could see it through broken cloud.
“Normally, if you see a meteor or a shooting star, they are just tiny little streaks of light, they last for a fraction of a second. This one was streaking across the sky for at least 10 seconds—probably longer than that—and it travelled from due south all the way across to the west, so it was a pretty incredible sight.”
