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The view of the sky yesterday offered an interesting picture. A “fireball” emerged. The German Aerospace Center confirmed the sighting.
Scores of people watched a fireball move through central Germany on Saturday night. “We had about 90 entries to our registration address in a few hours,” confirmed Jürgen Oberst of the fireball network on Sunday. This is a joint project of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Technical University (TU) of Berlin. “All the reports refer to an event around 6.40pm and most of the reports come from the Cologne-Frankfurt-Stuttgart area.”
“Most likely it is an asteroid fragment”
“Most likely it was an asteroid fragment that entered the atmosphere,” said DLR fireball network technical director Dieter Heinlein. The rather large chunk flew from east to west around Kassel around 6.41 pm The exact size is still unknown.
Such reports of fireballs are particularly prevalent in November and December, Heinlein said. On November 19, a similar chunk had already plunged into the atmosphere over Austria, and individual chunks fell to earth. It is still unclear whether this has now also happened in Germany.
Glowing fireball
“Very bright fireball from Düsseldorf-Ludenberg towards Mettmann. Then it disintegrated into several parts. Hour 6:40,” wrote a sky watcher from the “Rheinische Post”, as reported Sunday.
An observer from Siegen reported, according to the colonel, a bright beam moving across the sky, which had turned a green color similar to jade. Most of it seemed to have broken off and two smaller, shiny balls detached. The sighting took a maximum of five to seven seconds.
But the sky could also be observed in northern Germany. “Sighting of a bright object with a green tail flying from west to east. Tail three to four times the size of the object, with detachment of smaller parts,” wrote a man from Schleswig-Holstein on a page from the Gahberg observatory (Austria ).
According to the DLR, asteroids are small bodies left over from the time the planets formed. In our solar system, most of them can be found in the so-called asteroid belt between the planetary orbits of Mars and Jupiter. However, collisions in this area produced fragments that can also cross Earth’s orbit and create fireballs when submerged in the atmosphere.
