Videos have emerged on Twitter capturing the moment when a fireball was seen flying across the night sky in Ontario, Canada, on November 19. The meteor, dubbed C8FF042, was approximately one metre in diameter, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
"~1-m space object - temporary designation #C8FF042 - strikes Earth over Canada, creating stunning #fireball," the agency wrote on Twitter Saturday morning. The agency also said that it's only the sixth time in history that a global asteroid warning caught the object "pre-impact." Since 2008, five other objects have been detected in space before they struck Earth, according to ESA.
''For just the 6th time, global #asteroid warning systems saw it pre-impact, alerting #PlanetaryDefence experts where & when. 'Only' 6x, but this capability is rapidly improving,'' the agency wrote. In Toronto, the meteor was captured by Earth Cam's 'Tower View' camera. People also reported hearing a loud 'boom' upon impact.
Watch the video here:
The meteor entered Earth's atmosphere at approximately 3:27 am EST (1:57 pm IST) on Saturday, over Brantford, Ontario, the Minor Planet Center, which tracks objects in the solar system, said, according to a New York Times report. The fast-moving object, which has the temporary designation of #C8FF042, was detected in images taken at Mount Lemmon Survey near Tucson, Arizona, the Minor Planet Center added.
The New York Times report further said that Mike Hankey, the operations manager for the American Meteor Society, got a call about the meteor around 4 am EST from someone in Germany. Hankey, who was in Maine at that time, said messages about the meteor had started circulating about three hours earlier. "When these things happen, the astronomy community wants to know where the impact took place and, if meteorites survived, they want to recover them as soon as possible," Mr Hankey said.
A fireball is a meteor generally brighter than the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky, according to the American Meteor Society. The last time a meteor was detected pre-impact was in March, according to the ESA, when an object first detected in Hungary struck near Greenland.
