A fireball that streaked across the night sky from Scotland to Northern Ireland at around 10 p.m. local time Wednesday was likely space junk, according to the U.K. Meteor Network.
Dozens of sightings flooded social media platforms as skywatchers shared cellphone and doorbell camera video of the green-tinged fireball.
Here’s the footage from my Ring camera https://t.co/KiG3qOxYu6 pic.twitter.com/nhCD4P5HpP
— James Shampoo Williams 🏴 (@james_w_89) September 14, 2022
According to CBS News, the UK Meteor Network fielded 800 reports of the fireball, while both the International Meteor Organization and the American Meteor Society received more than 1,000 reports each.
The UK Meteor Network initially said it was “investigating to ascertain what the object was, meteor or space debris” but could not identify the cause of the “slow-moving meteor,” which was seen burning through the atmosphere for about 20 seconds, BBC News reported.
The network, comprising “Citizen Scientists just enjoying their hobby,” encompasses 170 detection cameras, recording meteors and fireballs over the United Kingdom, according to the group’s official website.
The suspected space junk would have landed in the sea south of the Hebrides if it had reached Earth, BBC News reported.
There have been nearly 800 reports of the fireball that was seen over UK last night. The preliminary trajectory has been calculated by the IMO and indicates that the object, which we now believe to be space debris, would have landed in the Atlantic south of the Hebrides. pic.twitter.com/skSvl0YH5Y
— UK Meteor Network (@UKMeteorNetwork) September 15, 2022
According to Space.com, initial computer trajectory suggested that the fireball first appeared north of Loch Ryan, about a two-hour drive southwest of Glasgow, and disappeared north of Islay Island, further north along the coast of the United Kingdom.
Luke Daly, a planetary scientist in Glasgow, said via social media that there is a “reasonably high chance that this is space junk” based on metrics such as its slower speed, “shallow entry angle [and] a substantial amount of fragmentation,” the space and astronomy focused website reported.
Likewise, Jenifer Millard, from the Awesome Astronomy podcast, told BBC Scotland that the color and slow speed of the fireball suggested it was likely space junk.
“If you have a look at those videos you can see it’s breaking up all the time. There are little bits coming off it, which indicates that it is quite a fragile structure. And so, combined, these three suggest that maybe it is a little bit of space debris,” Millard said.
Meanwhile, the International Meteor Organization believes the fireball’s trajectory began in a triangle between Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and northern England and traveled north and slightly west, before ending up somewhere over the North Atlantic Ocean, CBS News reported.
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