Watch meteor blaze across the sky above Scotland and explode ‘like a rocket’

Look, up in the sky! Is it a, er, plane crashing? A bomb? An eerie orange ball of light?

No, it was a meteorite. For a few brief moments today, a bright fireball lit up the midnight skies above Scotland.

The meteor was spotted streaking above Glasgow, Argyll and Bute and as far northwest as the Outer Hebrides at about 12.50am today.

The glowing object was even spotted zooming above Edinburgh Airport.

Meteors are rocks from the asteroid belt that sometimes travel millions of miles through deep space and enter the Earth’s atmosphere with a bang.

Their high velocity means that these rocks, even ones no smaller than a walnut, generate a fireball and can cause a sonic boom when they break.

Caitlin Holland, a 22-year-old studying childcare at the University of Glasgow, was among those who saw the cosmic rubble.

‘I was lying in my bed and I heard it a few seconds before I seen it and then my room lit up,’ she told Metro.

‘My first thought was to take a video because I thought no one would have believed me, I was gobsmacked when I seen it, probably the only one I’ll ever get to see.’

Merseyside lorry driver Ringolds Abolins told the BBC that, for a minute, he thought the meteor was a ‘rocket or missile’.

‘It burned out in two to four seconds. It was so quick and was a small green line behind,’ he added.

Others on social media said the boom of the meteor was akin to an ‘earthquake’, a ‘lightning bolt’ or a ‘sonic boom’.

The sighting comes only days ahead of the Delta Aquarid meteor shower, also known as the Southern Delta Aquariids, which peaks around mid-July.

As beautiful as these celestial fireworks displays are, what you’re usually seeing are the leftovers of a comet – a filthy snowball that leaves behind a trail of rocks and ice.

When the Earth passes through this cosmic waste, the debris burns up and creates a dazzling display.

If a meteor is exceptionally bright, it’s called a bolide, which is a cosmic fireball that explodes in an intense flash with clear fragmentation.

If one survives a buffeting by our atmosphere and crashes into the ground, it’s a meteorite. These tend to be about the size of a human fist, a far cry from the sometimes football field-size rock they once were.

Alfredo Carpineti, an astrophysicist and science writer for IFLScience, told Metro it would be tricky to estimate how large today’s meteor was

‘But if it was caught by camera on the UK Fireball Alliance,’ he added, referring to the network of cameras that capture the objects as they enter the atmosphere, ‘there might be a chance to find some fragments.’

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