It was as short as it was clear. For seven seconds, people across Britain who happened to be throwing their eyes to the heavens shortly before 10pm on Sunday went to see a fireball meteor that lit up the skies.
One witness said on Twitter “a huge flame” that “exploded into a huge tail of orange sparks sliding behind you like a giant fireworks display.”
Images captured by security cameras across England in places including Milton Keynes, Northamptonshire and Solihull showed the meteor shining brighter and brighter as it drifted across the sky before it apart.
The bright light emits when an object in space – from something as small as a grain of sand to a hulking behemoth like an asteroid – enters the Earth ‘s atmosphere and begins to burn up.
While millions of people may “want a star” when they see the amazing light display in the sky, they really want a meteor. If anything survives the journey and land on Earth, it is then called a meteorite.
Richard Kacerek, co-founder of the UK Meteor Network, a group of amateur meteor observers, said their cameras detected the meteor at 9:53 pm in Wiltshire, England.
“We think it’s a piece of comet or something softer like an asteroid that hit the atmosphere,” he said.
In this case, the fireball appeared to be moving slowly, he said, meaning it was visible further in the sky. Some people said they were hearing a sonic boost, however, which would indicate a relatively large object traveling at high speed as it approached Earth.
“The second half of the flight, we would see various pieces falling off,” he said, and it was possible that some had survived as meteorites.
Hundreds of people from across England and as far north as Scotland and Northern Ireland said they saw the meteor to the network, Kacerek said.
For amateur astronomers, meteor sightings over the sky are not particularly rare: About three or four of them appear each year.
However, usually at this time of year, the full moon makes meteors harder to see, Kacerek said. “This was an exception. This was a very bright meteor, which affected the brightness of the moon. ”
For those who weren’t watching, the meteor was a pleasant surprise.
“It’s always an amazing event, once in a lifetime, to see a really bright fireball if you’re not like us and look at them and look for them,” Kacerek said. “For ordinary witnesses to see something like this is definitely a priority. ”