An amazing sight: a meteor burns in the night sky

A brief, greenish glow in the night sky, certainly not a flash: a boulder blazing over Germany in the dark, startling scientists, amateur astronomers, and casual observers alike.

Nuremberg – A bright green meteor burns in the night sky over southern Germany. “There were more than 400 sightings, mostly from Germany and the Czech Republic, as well as almost all Central European countries,” a spokesman for the European Institute for Space Research (ESREN) said on Tuesday in Frascati, Italy. “Pollywood has been captured on numerous photos and videos, in which body fragments can be clearly seen.” The piece entered the atmosphere near Nuremberg at 10:45 p.m. on Monday.

Observers had reported noises a few kilometers away. The object may have exploded in what is called an airburst.

“It was a fairly large meteorite, basically a shooting star,” explained Matthias Grater, managing director of the Nuremberg Astronomical Working Group. The association runs the observatory in Nuremberg on a voluntary basis and has recorded the flares. The light phenomenon that occurs when a meteorite burns is called a meteorite. Fragments that reach the Earth after the explosion are called meteorites.

According to Esrin expert Richard Moissl, data on the orb’s exact orbit, size, and materials are not yet available. According to observers, the path in the sky ran roughly from southeast to northwest. “The size of the object needs to be determined more precisely, but based on the video recordings I would visually estimate it at around 1 meter or a little more,” said Moesel.

Small fragments may have arrived on Earth where the so-called meteorites and meteorite hunters were already looking for them.

Bjorn Poppe of the University Hospital for Medical Radiation Physics in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, reported on a relatively bright fireball in the sky. Social media users also described things like this on Twitter: “It looked great”, “First I thought it was lightning”, “It looked really bad”, “How cool”.

Hobby astronomer Graeter estimated that the block was several meters in size, “there may also have been several boulders. We only saw one that broke into several pieces.”

There were two dull explosions. The green color during the event likely came from the iron in the rock glowing green as it burned. According to Gretter, such events are unpredictable. dpa