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A fireball caused a strong flash in the sky at dawn on Monday, November 16, which can be seen in southern Portugal. The phenomenon, which occurred at 3:49 am, was registered by the sensors of the SMART project, the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics (IAA-CSIC), the astronomical observatories of Calar Alto (Almería), Seville and La Hita (Toledo).
The principal investigator of the SMART project, José María Madiedo, from the IAA-CSIC, explains that the so-called fireball is, in short, a rock from an asteroid that entered the atmosphere at 227 thousand kilometers per hour.
Speed is the reason why the rock has become a fireball of enormous luminosity that started at an altitude of about 132 kilometers west of Andalusia.
The strong light from the fireball became visible in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula and ended up extinguishing at an altitude of 60 kilometers above southern Portugal, as explained by the Spanish agency Efe and can be seen in the images released by the responsible for the SMART Project – whose objective is to continuously monitor the sky to record and study the impact on the Earth’s atmosphere of the rocks of different objects in the Solar System.
Due to the strong luminosity caused by the fireball, it was possible to observe the phenomenon with the naked eye in much of southern and central Spain.
See the unprecedented moment.
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