Cristina Hodgson
A SPECTACULAR fireball has been spotted streaking across the sky over Andalucia and the province of Malaga.
The fireball hurtled across the Malaga night sky at around 9:04pm last Tuesday, on October 4, after entering the Earth’s atmosphere at 69,000 kilometres an hour.
According to the astrophysicist Jose Maria Madiedo, from the Andalucian Astrophysics Institute (IAA-CSIC), who analysed the phenomenon, said the rock had come from an asteroid.
The high-speed collision with the atmosphere caused the rock to become incandescent generating a white-hot meteorite that began at an altitude of some 84 kilometres over the Gulf of Cadiz.
From there it advanced in a northwesterly direction and extinguished at a height of around 44 km over the sea and was observed by many in the provinces of Malaga, Cadiz, Huelva and Sevilla who reported the phenomenon on social networks and described the spectacular fireball to be ‘something huge falling from the sky.’
“A while ago we saw something huge falling from the sky of Marbella (Malaga). It didn’t look like a meteorite because it was just a big fireball. We don’t know what it could have been. We didn’t hear any rumble either” tweeted Akiritaun.
The spectacular fireball was captured by the SMART project detectors from the astronomical observatories of Calar Alto (Almeria), Sierra Nevada (Granada), La Sagra, La Hita and Sevilla.
The detectors of the SMART project operate within the scope of the Meteorological and Earth Observation Network of Southwest Europe (SWEMN), which aims to continuously monitor the sky, in order to record and study the impact on the terrestrial atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the Solar System.
READ MORE:
- WATCH: Impressive fireball ‘as bright as a moon’ streak across sky in Spain’s Andalucia
- WATCH: Impressive fireball streak across sky in Spain’s Andalucia
