Flag – Fireball over southern Germany may have been a meteor – Wikipedia

Stuttgart (AFP) – A fireball seen in the evening sky by people in Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate was, according to an expert, a meteor rather than space junk.

Several meteorite cameras have recorded racing ejecta from the solar system, astronomer Hans-Ulrich Keller of the Planetarium in Stuttgart explained on Friday.

Twitter and Instagram users in Tübingen, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Bad Kreuznach reported Thursday night a lightning-fast body and a glowing tail. According to Keeler, it flew over all of Central Europe. And Andreas Eberl of the Stuttgart Observatory told SWR that there is a lot to suggest it is a cosmic object.

It can’t be space junk, Keeler said, because it always flies with the Earth’s rotation, but the projectile moves in the opposite direction. It might have been the size of a football fist. An orb the size of a ball made entirely of iron could weigh 100 kilograms.

It was said that the meteor was between 100 and 120 kilometers in height at the time it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and when it lit up. Since his kinetic energy is converted into heat energy, hot air of several thousand degrees accompanies him in his career. The astronomer explained that the explosion exploded at a height of 20 to 40 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. “Such phenomena happen often, but the current state is amazing because it was a particularly bright object that was not obscured by clouds.”

Keeler was reminiscent of geological disasters caused by ejecta from space. About 15 million years ago, for example, a small planet caused a giant crater when it fell to Earth, today’s Nördlinger Ries in Bavaria. 65 million years ago, a small planet hit the Gulf of Mexico and 95% of all living things around the world died.

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