An impressive ball of fire crosses the sky of Ciudad Real and is seen 500 kilometers away

The Astronomical Complex of La Hita, in Toledo, has informed this Saturday of the fall of a meteorite from an asteroid in Sierra Morena, in the province of Ciudad Real.

As detailed by the complex in a statement, the fall of this meteorite has been recorded in the early morning of January 14, at 22:27 local time, when an impressive fireball could be seen in the night sky that crossed a long distance.

The fireball reached a luminosity similar to that of the full Moon and, due to its high brightness, could be seen from most of the country by numerous witnesses who were in the central and southern areas, who echoed the phenomenon on social networks.

It was also recorded by the detectors of the Red de Bolides y Meteoros del Suroeste de Europa (Red SWEMN), which operates in the Toledo Astronomical Complex, who work within the framework of the SMART Project, which is coordinated by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia ( IAA-CSIC), with the aim of continuously monitoring the sky to record and study the impact against the Earth’s atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the solar system.

It was also recorded by the detectors that this same research project has installed in the Calar Alto observatories (Almería), Sierra Nevada, Seville, Huelva, Madrid (Complutense University), El Aljarafe (Seville) and La Sagra (Granada).

This ball of fire has been analyzed by the researcher responsible for the SMART Project, astrophysicist José María Madiedo, from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), who has highlighted, in his results, that The phenomenon occurred when a rock entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of about 48,000 kilometers per hour.

The rock came from an asteroid that intersects with the Earth’s orbit and is called a “meteoroid”. The sudden friction of the rock with the atmosphere at this enormous speed caused the rock (the meteoroid) to become incandescent, thus generating a fireball that began at an altitude of about 86 kilometers above the village of Ventillas (southwest of the province of Ciudad Real).

From there he proceeded in an easterly direction and became extinct at an altitude of about 23 kilometers above Sierra Morena, almost on the vertical of the village Las Tiñosas (Ciudad Real). The great luminosity that this fireball reached meant that it could be seen from more than 500 kilometers away.

The astrophysicist has reported that, in total, the fireball traveled about 63 kilometers through the atmosphere. Another important result of this preliminary analysis is that the rock was not completely destroyed in the atmosphere and that a small part of it would have survived, falling to the ground in Sierra Morena in the form of a meteorite.