© YouTube/Coordman
Fire in the Sky
This footage, filmed by Tammy Kwan, a staff writer for Vancouver weekly newspaper The Georgia Straight, shows the bright ball visible above a stretch of Lougheed Highway in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia. In her writeup for The Georgia Straight, Kwan wrote that she had captured the video on her dashcam, and the sky "suddenly flashed green and then pale yellow."
The meteor is spotted by a motorists travelling on the Escort Way.
Video footage of the bright light with a fiery tail was identified by skywatching expert Rod Somerville.
"That one to me looks just like a nice bright meteor, known as a fireball," he said.
The footage was taken from a car travelling on the Escort Way near Boree about 7.45pm and uploaded to YouTube by David Bell.
© YouTube/Wapgee Inc (screen capture)
The incident occurred around 9PM, when citizens in the city of Gilgit and the surrounding Ghizer and Diamer districts saw the bright object racing through the night sky above the region´s remote, soaring mountains.
"I saw a light flash through the sky and then there were multiple blasts," Ghizer district resident Javed Iqbal told AFP Thursday.
"I felt as if something had hit the roof of my house. I rushed outside with my family members and saw everyone getting out of their homes. The blasts had shaken the whole valley," he said.
His story was echoed by others, including Shabir Mir of Gilgit, who said he saw the object "disappear into the mountains", followed seconds later by what sounded like more than one explosion.
© YouTube/OGVT - Observatoire géophysique, Val Terbi (screen capture)
© KTXS 12 ABC
People in the Snyder region also reported hearing a boom like that of a transformer failing or a sonic boom that a jet might create.
Based on the reports, it appears that something fell from the sky and got close enough to the ground that the sonic boom it created was audible to people on the ground in parts of our area. However, we have not received any reports of anything crashing to the ground.
The object could have been man-made space debris like a piece from a spent rocket. But we have not heard of any of these reentries from NASA or our military. More likely it was a piece of "rock" wandering around in our solar system that fell into our atmosphere.
As the object falls deeper into our atmosphere friction with air molecules increases and heats the object. This creates the streak of light in the sky. Most of the time the falling object burns up before hitting the ground.Since the falling object is likely traveling at several thousand miles per hour, it creates a sonic boom. If it is close enough to the ground, we may hear it.
Checking for a possible noise maker, the USGS earthquake site indicates no measured earthquakes in the state of Texas Sunday or Sunday evening.
Comment: Footage of the meteor was also captured by a police officer in Weatherford, Texas.
© Photo Twitter (@iangriffin)
Clear skies around the country allowed for sightings of what may have been a meteor (not pictured) last night.
Clear skies around the country allowed for sightings of what may have been a meteor (not pictured) last night.
ODT Online submitter Peter Simkins relates looking out of his window in Broad Bay towards Port Chalmers and seeing a ''yellow streak of light plummeting to earth''.
Other sightings have come in from in Blenheim, Porirua, Lake Ferry, Martinborough and New Plymouth.
Some people posted on social media about seeing the sky light up, while others described the light as being green in colour. Fairfax is this morning reporting that it may have been may be a Russian cargo rocket re-entering the earth's atmosphere.
One woman posted on Facebook that she saw the light in Lower Hutt.
"Yup saw it clearly in Lower Hutt. It was huge and the tail colorful."
The Herald was unable to contact an expert to comment on the sighting tonight, but a person at the University of Canterbury's Mt John Observatory said descriptions provided indicated people had seen a meteor.
According to Nasa, small chunks of rock and debris in space are called meteoroids.
They become meteors, or shooting stars, when they fall through a planet's atmosphere; leaving a bright trail as they are heated to incandescence by the friction of the atmosphere. Pieces that survive the journey and hit the ground are called meteorites.
© Via Facebook/Stef Kotwica
We have been contacted by someone who said they saw the phenomenon as they drove along Princess Elizabeth Way.
He asked us via twitter: "Seen two fireballs in the sky when heading down Princess Elizabeth Way. Heard anything?" He added that he was driving with his son and noticed two bright lights which dimmed and left smoke trails. I really can't believe me and my son would have been the only ones to see them, they were bright enough," he said.
Analysis of the video data shows that the meteor was first detectable at an altitude of 83 km (52 miles) above US Highway 219, southeast of the Pennsylvania town of DuBois. It then moved northeast some 42 km (26 miles) through the atmosphere at almost exactly 64 400 km/h (40 000 mph), ablating 42 km above the countryside just north of Winslow Hill, NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) said.
The camera data shows very little deceleration of the meteor, which gives it a poor chance of producing meteorites, MEO said and added that more analysis is required to rule this out. "The object had the brightness of a quarter Moon, which means we are dealing with an asteroid fragment weighing about 9 kg (20 pounds), with a diameter of roughly 18 cm (7 inches)."
Comment: A meteor was recorded from the same observatory four hours earlier over the Canton Ticino region of Southern Switzerland.