ARCHIVED - Great ball of fire over Morocco seen from Almeria

The ball was caused by a fragment of rock that had separated from an asteroid and crossed the sky over Morocco at 36,000 kilometres per hour.

If you were in Andalusia on Friday night and thought you saw a ball of fire in the sky you were not imagining things, as the Andalusian Astrophysics Institute’s SMART project has confirmed the presence of a fireball over Morocco at 11.12 pm.

The ball was caused by a fragment of an asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a speed of 36,000 kilometres per hour, around 81 kilometres above the Moroccan province of Taza, and travelled in a northwesterly direction.

Its passage was noted by the astronomy observatories in Seville, Sierra Nevada (Granada) and Calar Alto (Almería), along with several eye-witnesses, most of them in Andalusia.

The ball eventually disappeared from the monitoring systems’ sight about 40 kilometres above the centre of the Moroccan region over Bouhlou.

The SMART detectors run as part of the Southwest European Meteor and Meteoroid Network (SWEMN), which aims to continuously monitor the sky to record and study the impact on the Earth’s atmosphere of rocks from different objects in the Solar System.
Image: Calar Alto