A rock from an asteroid hit the Earth's atmosphere early Thursday morning at about 126,000 km/h, creating a large fireball over Madrid that could be seen across Spain. This is not an unusual event: besides space objects like this one, which disintegrate before reaching the ground, every year around 17,000 meteorites fall to Earth, according to the Madrid Planetarium.
The phenomenon, which took place at around 3.56am local time, was captured and recorded by the Southwestern Europe Meteor Network (SWEMN) from the La Hita meteor observation station in La Puebla de Almoradiel in Toledo. The fireball was recorded as part of the SMART project, an initiative of the Andalusia Astrophysics Institute (IAA-CSIC) that continuously monitors the sky in a bid to record and study the impact of different objects from the solar system on the Earth's atmosphere.
