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An impressive fireball, which reached a brightness similar to that of the full moon, crossed the Andalusian sky in the early hours of Wednesday morning, 28 May.
Astrophysicist José María Madiedo, researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) and director of the SMART project, said that the phenomenon happened, because a rock entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of about 146,000 kilometres per hour.
The rock was a detached part of a comet. Such rocks that enter our atmosphere at high speed are called meteoroids. As it slammed into the air at this incredibly high speed, its surface heated to a temperature of several thousand degrees and became incandescent. It was this incandescence that could be seen in the form of a fireball at an altitude of about 114 kilometres above the town of Romilla, in the province of Granada.
From that position, it moved to the northwest, finally extinguishing at an altitude of about 76 kilometres above the town of La Fuente Grande, in the province of Cordoba. The rock experienced several explosions along its trajectory, but the last one was the reason for its sudden luminosity, as it was very intense. The explosions happened due to several sudden ruptures of the rock. Before it was extinguished, the fireball travelled a total distance of about 51 kilometres in the Earth's atmosphere.
The fireball was recorded at 1.13am on Wednesday by the SMART project systems from the detection stations located at Huelva, La Hita (Toledo), Calar Alto, Sierra Nevada, La Sagra (Granada), Sevilla and Otura (Granada). SMART is a project of the Spanish national research council (CSIC) that develops the Southwest European meteor and bolide network (SWEMN).
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