© YouTube/Frankie Lucena (screen capture)
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© Castanet
Social media has lit up with speculation as to what the object was.
Some jokingly speculated it was an alien invasion, but the most common theory - and the most likely - is it was a meteor.
"Just something very large fell towards Vernon...bright light maybe really large meteor? Started high in the east sky and rapidly lowered behind the hills in the west," Liana Battye told Castanet.
Posted one witness on Facebook, "It lasted maybe three-and-a-half seconds. It looked huge. Over by the Swan Lake area, we saw it from Middleton."
The light was so bright it was seen in Enderby and Kamloops.
© YouTube/Green House Apartment Ekaterinburg
© YouTube/Meteors
The fireball began at a height of about 104 km and ended at an altitude of around 75 km. It was recorded in the framework of the SMART Project from the astronomical observatories of Calar Alto (Almeria, Spain), La Hita (Toledo, Spain), Seville and Huelva.
This spectacular fireball flew over southern Cordoba in the early hours of July 28, at 3:29 local time (1:29 universal time). It occurred as a result of the entry into the Earth's atmosphere of a fragment from comet 169P / NEAT at about 90 thousand kilometers per hour. The luminous phenomenon began at an altitude of about 104 km and advanced in a northeasterly direction, extinguishing to about 75 km of altitude when it was almost on the vertical of the locality of Baena.
Comment: This is the third fireball recorded over Spain in the past 11 days:
- Stunning meteor fireball seen over Madrid, Spain (July 27)
- Meteor fireball flies over Andalusia, Spain (July 17)
© YouTube/Meteors
The fireball began at a height of about 80 km and ended at an altitude of 45 km. It was recorded in the framework of the SMART Project from the astronomical observatories of Calar Alto (Almería, Spain) and La Hita (Toledo, Spain).
© YouTube/Meteors
The luminous phenomenon began on the province of Jaén, at a height of about 120 km above sea level, and ended at an altitude of about 75 km.
© Meteors (CAHA)
© Rolando LigustriNew Comet ASASSN1 (C/2017 O1) already glows aqua from carbon-laced gases. The comet is currently visible in the pre-dawn sky through modest-sized telescopes.
The 15th-magnitude object was caught before dawn on July 19th in the constellation Cetus using data from the quadruple 14-cm "Cassius" telescope on Cerro Tololo, Chile. Don't be put off by that magnitude. The comet has brightened quickly in the past few days; visual observers are now reporting it at around magnitude +10 with a large (7′), weakly condensed coma. Chris Wyatt of Australia relates that a Swan band filter does a great job enhancing the apparent brightness and contrast of the coma, a sign this is a "gassy" comet.
© StellariumThis wide-view map shows Comet ASASSN1's location at the Cetus–Eridanus border south of Alpha (α) Ceti (Menkar) on July 26th.
© Earth SkyArtist’s concept of an asteroid passing near Earth.
This means the asteroid's closest approach occurred 2.5 to 3 days before it was seen. Asteroid 2017 OO1 flyby had passed at about one-third the Earth-moon distance, or about 76,448 miles (123,031 km).
Although that's still a safe distance, a fact that stands out is that asteroid 2017 OO1 is about three times as big as the house-sized asteroid that penetrated the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February, 2013, breaking windows in six Russian cities and causing more that 1,000 people to seek treatment for injuries, mostly from flying glass.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
"The number of comets speaks to the amount of material left over from the solar system's formation," said James Bauer, lead author of the study and now a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. "We now know that there are more relatively large chunks of ancient material coming from the Oort Cloud than we thought."
Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never approach the Sun in a person's lifetime. In fact, those that travel inward from the Oort Cloud -- a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 186 billion miles (300 billion kilometers) away from the Sun -- can have periods of thousands or even millions of years.
This illustration shows how scientists used data from NASA's WISE spacecraft to determine the nucleus sizes of comets. They subtracted a model of how dust and gas behave in comets in order to obtain the core size.
Comment: The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 834 reports about a fireball seen over WA, OR, British Columbia, ID, Washington and Oregon on Sunday, July 30th 2017 around 04:53 UT.
The meteor was captured and posted on Twitter by Parker Sayers.