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Meteor sightings throughout UK
- Published on Monday, 24 September 2012 11:33
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Meteor sightings which may be space junk falling from orbit have been reported by people from across all of the UK.
Police have recorded sightings in Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, Northern Ireland, and the Midlands.
Unlike most meteor sightings which are over in a flash, the lights were persistant, larger, and more colourful, leading experts to speculate that the lights could be created by satellite debris breaking up in the atmosphere.
The sightings have also been widely reported to the media. One spotter near Edinburgh said the lights appeared to be something "pretty large breaking up in the atmosphere".
"I've seen shooting stars and meteor showers before, but this was much larger and much more colourful."
Coastguards in the Shetland Islands also reported that they had been informed by a member of the public about a sighting, making it the country’s most northerly sighting.
Another spotted said it was "kind of a mass of light, gold light. Everything moving in unison".
"It wasn't diverging... I thought it was a plane at first. It was quite low on the horizon and moving much slower than I'd expect to see a shooting star, but it was amazing."
Another said that the scene was like one from Independence Day. A spotter from Nottinghamshire said she saw "a bright yellow and orange ball". After checking the internet, she discovered she wasn’t alone.
She told the BBC: "We only saw the one. It was quite low as well. It wasn't that far away to be honest. We thought something was actually going to come down in the actual village. It was travelling from east to west. It was coming down but it was going across more than it was going down."
There were sightings in south Wales, as well out towards Aberystwyth. One Welsh spotter said he saw a “stream of light” while looking out to sea.
"I thought first of all it was a plane going down then I thought what the devil is it?
"The best way I can explain it is that it looked like a train with all different carriages on it... it lasted about 25 to 30 seconds. I've never seen anything like it - it was really, really bright."
Dr Tom O’Brien of the Jodrell Bank Observatory said it was tricky to pinpoint the cause behind the lights.
"It's hard to say exactly, whether it was a chunk of rock coming in from outer space, burning up in the atmosphere, or a bit of space debris we call it, space junk, which is basically man-made stuff from a spacecraft that's burning up in the atmosphere.
"[The object was] probably 80 miles up or so, high up, moving very fast, actually, 18,000 miles an hour, probably, at least."
Colin Johnston from the Armagh Planetarium said in was unlikely to be a normal meteor shower that is common at this time of year.
“There are actually several small, faint, meteor showers scheduled across September but they're so unspectacular, not many people actually bother looking for them.
"I think that actually this spectacle tonight might not be associated with that."
"I think it's something just by chance has happened to come in tonight, some piece of actual space junk floating around the universe for billions of years has just picked tonight to fall in across our skies, or a satellite that's been up for some years has decided to burn up," he said.
