A fireball lights up the sky over Europe.
Social media became flooded late Saturday with viral videos of a large blue-green fireball streaking across the sky over Portugal, lighting up the night. Now the European Space Agency (ESA) says the meteor appears to have been a small part of a bigger, icy body impacting Earth’s atmosphere.
“It appears that this object was a small piece of a comet,” ESA wrote on X Sunday. “We estimate that it flew over Spain and Portugal travelling at ~45 km/s before burning up over the Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of ~60 km.”
Dozens of sighting reports quickly flooded into the International Meteor Organization.
The Spanish Observatorio de Calar Alto concurred that the “object had a cometary origin.”
The observatory estimates the fireball first became visible as it burned up over Europe at an altitude of 122 km (76 miles) and lit up the sky for the next several seconds as it fragmented and flamed out by the time it was at 54 km (34 miles) high.
Some early reports indicated that part of the fireball may have made it to the ground in Portugal, but the ESA says “the likelihood of any meteorites being found is very low.”
The ESA did not immediately have any other details on which comet the fireball may have originated from but noted that “it was definitely not tracked or reported prior to impact.”
Developing story...
