A meteorite, or more precisely a meteoroid, since the object was only about 1 meter in diameter, lit up the sky over Northern France in the early hours of the morning, disintegrating in the atmosphere without doing any damage.
"It was discovered about 5 hours before the impact, which occurred around 4.00 am", confirmed to ANSA Juan Luis Cano González, coordinator of the information service of the European Space Agency (ESA) center for the surveillance of asteroids at Esrin (European Center for Earth Observation) in Frascati: “It is the seventh time that the impact of an asteroid has been revealed so early”.
Here are four different views of asteroid #SAR2667 as it enters the atmosphere over Western Europe.
#Meteor #France #UK pic.twitter.com/TwGmOrEw2r
— Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) February 13, 2023
The meteoroid, called Sar 2667, was particularly visible above the city of Rouen, but on social networks there are several videos also from Paris and the south of England.
The early detection of the object "is a sign of the rapid advancement of global asteroid detection capabilities," celebrated ESA on Twitter.
Among other things, the event occurred almost in perfect coincidence with the 10-year anniversary of the fall of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which took place on February 15, 2013 and was the most studied in history.
A meteoroid is a relatively small rocky or metallic fragment: when they enter the atmosphere of a planet, these bodies heat up by friction with the molecules of atmospheric gases and partially or completely vaporize.
In turn, the gases along the way become electrically charged and therefore emit light of various colors, depending on the temperature and chemical composition: this luminous trail is what we call a 'meteor' or 'shooting star'.
