On the night of September 14, people across Scotland and Northern England and Ireland saw a fireball streak the skies. Soon, Twitter became flooded with videos of the stunning sight.
"Did I see a shooting star in or is that something crashing out the sky?" Twitter user Rhiannon Hayes while sharing a video that has now gone viral.
Did I legit just see a shooting star in Motherwell or is that something crashing out the sky? pic.twitter.com/DBQh8zXjnT— Rhiannon Hayes (@RhiannonHayes12) September 14, 2022
More people followed suit, sharing visuals of the fireball from their respective locations.
We just witnessed something bright moving west through the sky which I guess must be something burning up in the earth’s atmosphere. Caught it on the security cameras #meteorpic.twitter.com/GhClBkzNLrRelated stories
— Stevie Doyle (@stevie_doyle) September 14, 2022
Wow — a meteor appears to have entered the earth’s atmosphere & crashed somewhere north of #Glasgow, along #Scotland’s northwestern coast.pic.twitter.com/5E7h1uIdf5— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) September 14, 2022
For a while, experts wondered if it was a meteor or space debris.
UK Meteor Observation Network said it was space debris, since it seemed to be moving much slower than a meteor, the group's founder Richard Kacerek told CNN.
The network believed SpaceX's Starlink was the source of the debris, The Guardian reported. But after gathering more information, they discarded the theory.
John Maclean, an astronomer with network, told The Guardian, the fireball was probably a "small piece of an asteroid that’s broken off an asteroid".
“The speed and the way we break it up, is what threw us initially. It was quite slow which is more consistent with a space junk, so thought too slow for a meteor," Maclean added.
After journeying through skies above the UK, the meteor plunged into the Atlantic.
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