A fireball was sighted on Tuesday night in the sky over Portugal and Galicia, Spain, the person in charge of the SMART project, from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) told the Lusa agency.
The main researcher of the SMART project, José María Madiedo, explained that the event took place at 22:08 in Spain (21:08 in Lisbon).
According to witnesses in Galicia, the fireball was seen for three seconds, with an intense green color and fragmented.
We already have pictures! ??
Meteorite “hunted” in Braga!
“Here he is… seen by the meteor detector of the Astronomical Observatory of Braga in the north direction at 21.07h!
Was it cute??”
©?João Vieira pic.twitter.com/WqJ68mSdxq— Meteo Trás-os-Montes – Portugal (@MeteoTrasMontPT) March 14, 2023
This Tuesday night, the Meteo Trás-os-Montes page published reports of the fireball seen mainly in the north of Portugal, but also in other parts of the country. Later, he released a video of the incident, captured by the Braga Astronomical Observatory.
José María Madiedo said that the trajectory and speed had not yet been calculated and that he was waiting for data from other observatories.
The entry of a meteorite into the Earth’s atmosphere is the cause of this phenomenon. The rock coming from space, when colliding with the atmosphere at an enormous speed, becomes incandescent, thus generating a fireball.
“By the behavior of the rock, the most likely is that it came from an asteroid and not a comet”, said Madiedo to Lusa. The object will have flown over the North of Portugal or perhaps the Atlantic along the coast of Portugal and Galicia.
The SMART project detectors operate within the scope of the Southwest Europe Meteorological and Earth Observation Network (SWEMN), which aims to continuously monitor the sky in order to record and study the impact on the Earth’s atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the Solar System. .