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A fireball passed in the early morning of Monday through the sky of southern Portugal, where the light, caused by a meteor, ended up going out, according to information from the Spanish agency Efe.
The fireball, which traveled through the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, was observed by a Spanish scientific project at a speed of 227,000 kilometers per hour. The event was detected by the sensors of the SMART project, of the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics (IAA-CSIC), from the astronomical observatories of Calar Alto (Almería), Seville and La Hita (Toledo).
According to the analysis of the principal investigator of the SMART project, José María Madiedo, of the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics, the fireball was registered at 3:49 am (local time) on Monday (2:49 am from Lisbon).
The phenomenon occurred when a rock from an asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of about 227,000 kilometers per hour and, due to its great luminosity, it could be seen in much of southern and central Spain.
The collision with the atmosphere at this speed caused the rock to turn incandescent, thus generating a fireball that started at an altitude of about 132 kilometers west of Andalusia. From there, it followed a westward trajectory, dying out at an altitude of about 60 kilometers over southern Portugal.
The SMART project detectors operate within the scope of the Southwest Europe Earth and Meteorological Observation Network (SWEMN), which aims to continuously monitor the sky, in order to record and study the impact on the Earth’s atmosphere of the rocks of different objects in our solar system.
