Social media is buzzing this morning as stargazers question a 'mysterious fireball' seen in the night sky across Glasgow.
Steve Owens, astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, saw the fireball for himself and has explained what people have witnessed.
He told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “It was incredible, I was sitting in my living room at exactly 10 o’clock last night and saw out of the window due south this brilliant fireball, this meteor streaking across the sky, and I could tell that it was something special because I could see through broken cloud, it wasn’t perfectly visible, I could see that it was fragmenting, breaking apart, there were little bits coming off it.
“And normally if you see a meteor or a shooting star they are just tiny little streaks of light, they last for a fraction of a second, this one was streaking across the sky for at least 10 seconds probably longer than that and it travelled from due south all the way across to the west so it was a pretty incredible sight.”
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He said it is possible it could have landed but said it is “highly unlikely” it landed in Scotland.
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He said: “Normally these tiny little streaks of light, these little shooting stars, they all burn up and everything just vanishes and evaporates in the atmosphere, but the thing last night was bigger than a little bit of dust. The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that, so it’s certainly not impossible that bits could have landed.
“It looked like it was travelling a fair distance as these things do and it was fairly flat across the sky as I saw it.
“The UK Meteor Network, which has had hundreds of reports from around Scotland and further afield, is going to be able to triangulate all of those reports to work out its trajectory, it looked to me like it was heading, it was certainly heading towards the west and given that people in Northern Ireland were reporting seeing it it could well have passed over land and ended up in the Atlantic but it’s certainly not impossible that it landed, finding it will be the challenge.”
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