Holy Crap!! Did anyone else see that meteor today over the UK?

Originally posted by Laurauk
Lets all just thank our lucky stars that there was no impact. (Or was there?)

There was never any real danger of an impact with this object. Despite widespread reports of how "big and bright" the fireball was, a relitively small meteoroid is capable of causing a fireball like this one.

Our atmosphere usually stops even quite large objects (dead in their tracks sometimes relitively speaking), but this one came in at such a low angle(as I pointed out on this thread here), even if it was big enough to penetrate our atmosphere and strike the ground while still travelling with a significan portion of it's "cosmic velocity" intact, the entry angle was so low that it could well have missed the ground all together and headed back out to space.

Objects like this one hit the atmosphere on a regular basis, the only reason it drew so much attention is that most people usually miss them, but in this case the unusually low entry angle gave us a meteor that was long enough lasting (most are much shorter) for people to stop what they were doing and look up, as well as being at just the right time when there were still people out and about. It's also a stroke of luck that there was little cloud cover at the time.

Although spectacular by most peoples standarads, and certainly in terms of how long the fireball was visible for, it was actually not that bright in terms of big fireballs. Best estimates put it at a bit under the brightness of the full moon (-10 magnitude), but it's not that unusual for fireballs to exceede this.

In some cases, like this one in South Africa in 2009 they can even exceed the brightness of our sun (-26 magnitude), which incidentally did not impact the ground either, although there could be pieces of it lying on the ground somewhere - I'm not sure if any of it was ever found.