Britain at the end of last week experienced almost the end of the world. On Saturday evening, the police received a huge number of calls from residents of England and Scotland, who reported a fireball flying in the dark sky with a tail and an unusual orange glow. Frightened eyewitnesses could not logically explain the phenomenon and assumed that it was a terrible plane crash.
The glow in the sky was unusually bright. “I left work and was already getting into the car, and then I saw a very bright light slowly spreading across the sky. At first I thought it was a flashlight, but then I realized that it was impossible because it was moving too fast. Then I decided it was the plane that caught fire,”says Argyll resident Adam Hepworth.
The strange celestial phenomenon was reported by hundreds of Internet users on social networks, and observed the glow in most of the UK. Some admitted with admiration that it was very beautiful. It was amazing. Big and bright ball”,“The core is orange, the tail is green,”- eyewitnesses shared on Facebook and Twitter.
Soon the witnesses of the "apocalypse" were reassured by meteorologists. The British Meteorological Service's microblogging said: “Hello everyone. For those who have seen something strange in the night sky, we can inform that, in our opinion, it is a meteor. " The police, in turn, announced that there were no accidents at that time.
Balloon flight direction
Be that as it may, what happened impressed even astronomers. “In 30 years of observation, this meteor is the best we've seen. Point , - admitted one of the employees of the Kilder Observatory.
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“Sometimes you can see a very large space object entering the atmosphere and causing a glow,” explains astronomer David Whitehouse. - When we see how a meteor disintegrates, before our eyes are the fragments of a planet that could not form during the formation of the solar system. It may have been orbiting the Sun for several thousand or millions of years."
Whitehouse is not sure if the celestial body burned up in the upper atmosphere. “Judging by the brightness of the glow, it could easily fly to the surface of the Earth, but we still have no idea where this could have happened,” the astronomer noted.
As a reminder, as recently as last week, astronomers made a frightening statement that in a year we will have a collision with the asteroid 2012 DA14, if, of course, it does not warm up with the Earth. The scale of the disaster, scientists believe, will be comparable to the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.