A huge meteor   was put down streaking through the former morning sky of Alabama last week and ending in an impressive explosion .

The incident took place at 12.19am local sentence on Friday , August 17 , with six NASA cameras bewitch the moment the fireball blotch through the sky . It has , somewhat understandably , been called the Alabama Fireball .

“ Last Nox , at 12:19 AM Central Daylight Time , numerous eyewitnesses in the South East reported seeing a very smart bolide , which was also detected by all six NASA meteor television camera in the part , ” NASA Meteor Watch wrote onFacebook .

“ Analysis of the data point indicates that the meteor was first see at an altitude of 58 miles [ 93 kilometers ] above Turkeytown , Alabama ( northeast of Gadsden ) , go west of north at 53,700 miles [ 86,400 kilometers ] per hour . It break up some 18 mi [ 29 kilometers ] above the small townsfolk of Grove Oak . ”

The asteroid that caused the event is thought to have been about 2 meters ( 6 base ) across . And rather impressively , the fireball is read to have glitter about 40 times as brilliant as the Moon .

This eccentric of event is live as a ball of fire , a meteor that suddenly brighten in the night sky as it explode in the atmosphere . If fragments of this meteor make the ground as meteorites , then it is usually advert to as a bolide , although NASAnotesthe damage are used interchangeably .

At the bit NASA say they did n’t live if this fireball had produced any meteorite or not . But it was still an impressive enough event to trigger off all the Meteoroid Environment Office ’s cameras and detector in the region .

globe is strike by alarge numberof space rocks like this every class . Ones this belittled are particularly hard to recognise before they impinge on , but thankfully their small size means they normally explode before they arrive at the ground . This can still get terms , though ; the shockwave from the2013 Chelyabinskmeteor explosion in Russia injured century .

Not all asteroids of this side explode completely , though . In other July , scientists reported that they hadfound fragmentsfrom a likewise sized careen . Most imposingly , this asteroid had been chase before it bump off the standard atmosphere – only the second time in history scientists had detected an asteroid , follow it explode , and then collected pieces of it .

( H / T : livescience.com )