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Massive fireball seen falling over Scotland and Northern Ireland
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The United Kingdom was given a surprise in the skies after witnesses spotted a fireball entering Earth’s atmosphere.
According to the UK Meteor Network, the object was most likely a form of space debris, quite possibly from Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellite.
Over 800 reports we made for the fireball, which lasted roughly for 20 seconds around 10:00 pm on Wednesday.
John Maclean of the Royal Astronomical Society told The Guardian you could tell it was a piece of space junk and not a celestial object due to the length of time the object burned up in the atmosphere.
“Most most meteors enter the atmosphere between around 75,000 and 80,000 mph,” said Maclean. “Whereas space junk is slower at 25,000 to 30,000 mph. As a result space junk is visible across the sky for much longer. A meteor would be a matter of a few seconds, whereas this was visible for 20 seconds. That’s too slow for meteor.”
Researchers are still looking to determine exactly what caused the nighttime spectacle over The United Kingdom.
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