A ball of fire was spotted tonight 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, it also advanced.
The page on the Facebook social network ‘Meteo Trás os Montes — Portugal’ released this Tuesday night reports of the fireball seen mainly in the north of Portugal, but in other parts of the country. He later published an image of the meteor.
José María Madiedo said that the trajectory and velocity 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 results in that phenomenon.
The rock coming from space, when colliding with the atmosphere at an enormous speed, became incandescent, thus generating a fireball.
“By the behavior of the rock, it is most likely that it came from an asteroid and not a comet”, he also told Lusa.
According to the first information, still without confirmation, the rock will have flown over the north of Portugal or perhaps the Atlantic along the coast of Portugal and Galicia, he stressed.
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, with the aim of recording and studying the impact on the Earth’s atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the System. Solar.