Bright fireball streaked across the sky above Madrid, Spain

bright-fireball-streaked-across-the-sky-above-madrid-spain

A bright fireball streaked across the sky above the Spanish capital Madrid and was seen across the entire country on April 13, 2013. The object struck the atmosphere above the Villamuelas district in the province of Toledo, southwest of Madrid around 21:45 UTC (11:45pm).

The Spanish Institution for the Study of Meteors and Meteorites, which tracked the fireball, classified the meteorite as a piece of a comet that was flying by Earth.

RT reports: “The impact was so abrupt that the object immediately caught fire, creating a ball of flame around 100 kilometers above the Earth,” Jose Maria Madiedo of the University of Huelva told the Huffington Post. The meteor then shot towards Madrid at over 75,000 kilometers an hour before disintegrating completely over the Serranillos Valley at an altitude of 70 kilometers.

Madiedo said that thankfully there was no danger that the fireball could have crashed to earth and explained, “There were several flashes of blue and green until the huge trace faded into a last flash. We were shouting uncontrollably and we kept our eyes fixed on the sky as if we were waiting for it to reappear. We could not believe what we had just seen."

The video above was caught on camera by the Hita Observatory at the University of Huelva at around 11:45pm local time.

Astronomer Leonor Ana Hernandez described the event as a flash that began to grow in a matter of seconds. When the explosion happened, everything around us turned white for a few seconds and several green and blue colors followed the initial explosion, she said.

Featured image: Courtesy of J.M. Madiedo, University of Huelva

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4 Comments

  1. Last night , about 10, 10:30pm ,while driving home saw a very bright fireball falling almost vertical somewhere above the ocean here in Portugal.dont know what it was maybe space debris or a meteorite…but this kind of activity is appening too many times all over the world.

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