A large meteor was seen streaking across the night sky on Monday evening, with residents in Westminster and Wolverhampton reporting sightings.
Experts believe the meteor burnt up in the atmosphere before it could make landfall in Britain. While initial video and images indicated that it was going to land in the UK, data suggests it disintegrated high above the ground.
They have put out a call for people to send them as much footage of the meteor as possible so they can analyse the event.
Photographs were captured by automatic cameras as part of the UK Meteor Network, a community of amateur scientists, which is gathering imagery and footage of the meteor event to supplement its own 186 dedicated meteor-spotting cameras. It caught images of the bright meteor at around 8.01pm. Last year, the network recorded 1,615,558 meteors.
The Met Office tweeted: “Reports of a meteor in the sky over the UK just now. If you managed to take any footage, we’d love to see it.”
Laura, from Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, caught the meteor on camera from her front room at around 8pm. Her video showed a light streaking through the sky above a residential area for just under 10 seconds before disappearing from view.
“I had just turned my computer off and looked up out of the window – it was perfect timing,” she said. “It wasn’t like a shooting star as I have seen in the past. It seemed overwhelmingly close.”
“It was large in the sky, orange with an orange blaze behind it, not what I would describe as a long shooting star tail but a shorter orange one.
“Then it just disappeared, popped out of the sky. It seemed like it hadn’t really happened.”
Tom Tugendhat, the MP, also reported a sighting “over Westminster”.
A Met Office spokesman said the time of day and clear skies contributed to the quality of the sightings.
Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere before reaching Earth or disintegrate upon contact with land. While there was initial optimism this meteor could be found intact, analysis has extinguished that hope.
Recovered meteors, if located quickly, can shed light on mysteries of the universe and also help answer questions on the origin of the solar system, as well as the formation of Earth as we know it.
Dr Luke Daly, a leading meteor expert and lecturer in planetary geoscience at the University of Glasgow, told The Telegraph: “We’ve been crunching the numbers all morning. Unfortunately it seems to have all burnt up in the atmosphere at a height of about 39km — so no meteorites on the ground, sadly.”
He said the meteor was travelling at around 22,000mph and was likely to have weighed just 30 grams.
Charlotte Bays, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum and the secretary of the UK Fireball Alliance, told The Telegraph there were no plans to hunt down any potential remains of the meteor following the findings.
“The early analysis suggests that the space rock that caused the fireball burned up high in the atmosphere, and so it is unlikely that any meteorites have made it to the ground,” she said.
“This being the case, we’re not planning to send any meteorite recovery teams at this time.”
Dr Daly was instrumental in finding, preserving and studying the Winchcombe meteorite, which landed on a family’s driveway in early 2021.
Dr Richard Greenwood, a senior research fellow at the Open University, who also helped find Winchcombe, told The Telegraph: “Unfortunately, initial information suggests it burnt up high in the atmosphere. That is fairly common.”
It is likely that the meteor was too small or soft to make it through the atmosphere without breaking up completely. Had it been larger or harder, some rock may have survived the trip and landed in Britain.
“It certainly looked as though it had potential to deposit meteorites on the surface,” Dr Greenwood said. He said the landing site “would likely be on land rather than over the sea”, with the UK the most likely final destination.
“All the material could well have been destroyed prior to it reaching the Earth’s surface,” he said. “It depends on how big it was to start with, how fast it was going and the angle of flight. The composition is a factor. Some meteorites are very soft and just fall apart on the way down.”
The UK Meteor Network was instrumental in finding Winchcombe, which was traced within a matter of hours and was in near-perfect condition when discovered, giving scientists a specimen that had not had time to be altered and contaminated by the Earth’s soil or atmosphere.
It was found to be Britain’s first-ever carbonaceous chondrite meteorite and the best example of this kind of ancient rock ever found.
A study published in Science Advances in November 2022 found it was likely that the rock contained water at one point, a breakthrough discovery bolstering the theory that asteroids may have brought water to Earth billions of years ago.
“The near-pristine hydrogen isotopic composition of the Winchcombe meteorite is comparable to the terrestrial hydrosphere, providing further evidence that volatile-rich carbonaceous asteroids played an important role in the origin of Earth’s water,” the authors wrote.