This Tuesday morning a fireball has crossed the sky of the province of Cuenca. The rock reached a speed of entry into the atmosphere of 90,000km / h and came from a comet. In addition, the meteroid was recorded by the systems of the SMART project at 7:11 a.m. Spanish peninsular time.
The rock, which was a piece of a comet that had come off, entered the atmosphere at high speed; so that caught fire, according to the analysis of astrophysicist José María Madiedo from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía IAA-CSIC and researcher responsible for the SMART project.
The route of the fireball began about 93 kilometers above the center of the province of Cuenca. After this, it headed east and became extinct at an altitude of about 51 km above the town of Chelva, in the northwest of the province of Valencia, according to data detected by the SMART project.
SMART project, the fireball detector
The meteroid has been registered by the SMART project detectors from the astronomical observatories of Calar Alto (Almería), La Sagra (Granada), Sierra Nevada, Seville and La Hita (Toledo). But it’s not the first time; since this project is responsible for making this type of recordings and then analyze them.
This is the video recorded by the SMART project in which the fireball is seen crossing part of the sky:
And it is that the SMART project is developed by the Network of Bolides and Meteors of Southwest Europe (SWEMN Network). It is a research network coordinated by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC). “The SWEMN Network aims to continuously monitor the sky in order to record and study the impact against the Earth’s atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the Solar System “, they indicate.
In short, it is not the first time that we have seen a fireball cross our sky nor will it be the last. But luckily this type of meteroids do not pose a risk to us precisely because they catch fire when they enter the atmosphere. The same thing happens, although they are much smaller particles of dust or rocks, with meteor showers.