St Patrick's Day Meteor Flashes Across Sky Over Britain

Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email Reddit Telegram

A bright meteor fireball was spotted over London in the early hours of St Patrick’s Day.

A large piece of space rock left a greenish-blue trail as it streaked above London on Thursday morning.

The fireball is said to be the biggest ever recorded by UK Meteor Observation Network.

BYPASS THE CENSORS

You can unsubscribe any time. By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

The green colour reported by many is a result of the rock interacting with the Earths atmosphere resulting in the gas or light refractions appearing to look green.

The Week reports:

Video caught from #London #sky tonight #Battersea @LBC pic.twitter.com/evfnLqHQ9i

— Paul Gilbert (@PaulGilbertDj) March 17, 2016

The giant fireball appeared at around 3.16am this morning and lit up the sky with an enormous flash.

DJ Paul Gilbert caught the spectacular show on his vehicle’s dashcam while driving in the capital and posted the video on Twitter.

According to the UK Meteor Observation Network, it was brighter than most, with just one in 12,000 meteors achieving a fireball of that size.

“It was actually two explosions from the same meteor – a smaller one and the larger one – signals that the final one has potential of a fragment surviving and falling to the earth,” co-founder Richard Kacerek told the Daily Mirror.

“Lots of people are reporting the green one. This is completely plausible: it is a very highly heated rock because it passes through the atmosphere, then it picks up heat and speed and depending on this, the gas or light refractions can be seen as green.”

The group managed to capture a video of the meteor, which Kacerek said was the biggest he’d seen since the network began, from its camera in the village of Church Crookham, in Hampshire.

“A meteor describes the process upon which a meteoroid burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere, this results in the huge flashes more commonly known as ‘shooting stars’,” says the Huffington Post. “If a meteoroid then survives the entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and crashes, it becomes a meteorite.”