Cristina Hodgson
A DAZZLING meteor has been filmed soaring over Andalucia and Castilla-La Mancha at 96,000km per hour.
The fireball was recorded this Saturday by the SMART project detectors from the astronomical observatories at Sevilla, La Hita (Toledo), La Sagra (Granada), Sierra Nevada (Granada), Calar Alto (Almeria), and Madrid (Jaime Izquierdo, Complutense University of Madrid).
The spectacular fireball crossed the sky between the northeast of the province of Jaen in Andalucia and southwest of the province of Albacete ( Castilla-La Mancha), after entering the atmosphere at around 6:21am at a speed of 96,000 kilometres per hour.
Credit: Meteors- Jose M. Madiedo (YouTube).
The high-speed collision with the atmosphere caused the rock to become incandescent generating a white-hot meteorite that began at an altitude of some 82 kilometres above Andalucia, specifically over the northeast of the province of Jaen.
From there the fireball advanced in a north-easterly direction, and flew over Castilla-La Mancha, extinguishing over the southwest of the province of Albacete at an altitude of about 29 kilometres.
According to the researcher responsible for the SMART project, astrophysicist Jose Maria Madiedo of the Andalucian Institute of Astrophysics (IAA-CSIC), the burst of bluish-white light could be seen from more than 500 kilometres away and was observed by many people in Andalucia and Castilla La Mancha.
The detectors of the SMART project operate within the scope of the Meteorological and Earth Observation Network of Southwest Europe (SWEMN), which aims to continuously monitor the sky, in order to record and study the impact on the terrestrial atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the Solar System.
The observation follows a similar sighting by the detectors of SMART in January, where a large meteor was recorded streaking across the sky between Morocco and Andalucia at 65,000km per hour.
