Fireball seen in skies above Murcia, Andalucía and central Spain
Monday, July 11, 2016 @ 12:10 AM
A FIREBALL brighter than a full moon was seen crossing Spain in the early hours of yesterday (Saturday) morning, caused by a meteoric rock hitting the Earth's atmosphere at 95,000 kilometres per hour (nearly 60,000mph).
It was caught on telescope at the La Hita observatory in Toledo at 23.06hrs exactly, and was seen from the ground by the naked eye from Murcia, Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha and Madrid.
Meteor detectors set up by the University of Huelva, on Spain's far south-west coast, based in Sevilla, the Sierra Nevada, Calar Alto (Almería province) and Huelva city itself were designed to monitor the skies continuously to enable astrophysicists to analyse the impact of burning space rocks coming from the Solar System and colliding against the Earth's atmosphere.
These studies, part of the so-called SMART project, found that the fireball soared directly over northern Africa, which is why it was bright enough to be seen from southern and central Spain.
The brusque collision with the atmosphere forced the temperature of the meteoric rock to shoot up very suddenly, creating a fireball at an altitude of 107 kilometres above Morocco.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com