On Wednesday night, a bright fireball went flying above the heads of those living in Scotland and parts of Ireland and the UK. The sparkling phenomenon has swept across the night sky for over 10 seconds, which is indeed unusual for a fireball.
Scientists still don’t know for sure what the phenomenon was, although they can surely take a guess. However, the UK Meteor Network is placing its bet that a meteor is to blame for the celestial show, which remains the best theory.
Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, explained, as The Scotsman quotes:
The UK Meteor Network, which has had hundreds of reports from around Scotland and further afield, is going to be able to triangulate all of those reports to work out its trajectory.
It looked to me like it was heading… it was certainly heading towards the west and, given that people in Northern Ireland were reporting seeing it, it could well have passed over land and ended up in the Atlantic, but it’s certainly not impossible that it landed – finding it will be the challenge.
Meteors and fireballs appear in the night sky pretty often around the world, and our publication has been writing about some of them. For instance, back in late August, we shared the news about the bright meteor flash that Americans from multiple states had to witness.
What’s puzzling at the fireball appearing over Scotland on Wednesday is its long duration time. It remained in the sky for almost 20 seconds.
Hundreds of people reported the sparkling phenomenon to the UK Meteor Network. If it wasn’t a meteor, another theory is that the world had witnessed the falling of a piece of space junk, such as a piece belonging to a satellite, a rocket, and so on.
