Fireball ‘bright as the moon’ lights up sky over Japan

A large fireball made night into day for a split second across western Japan.

The Washington Post said it was believed to have been a meteor that streaked across the dark sky at about 11:08 p.m. local time Tuesday.

“What I saw in the videos were amazing, stunning — a beautiful live show in the sky,” University of Glasgow professor of planetary geoscience Luke Daily told the Post by phone.

“People reported feeling the air vibrate. It was as bright as the moon,” Toshihisa Maeda, the head of Sendai Space Museum, said, according to The Guardian.

Fireballs occur when meteoroids, from the size of a fist to the size of a basketball, enter the atmosphere very fast and under a tremendous amount of friction, burning very bright, very quickly.

“A fireball is bigger, brighter and more long-lived” than meteors, Daly told the Post. “A meteor is, like, blink and you miss it, but fireballs are like, ‘That’s incredible!’”

It was seen from Kagoshima in the west to Osaka’s Kansai Airport, 124 miles to the east, Space.com reported

Daily believes Japan’s fireball was from an asteroid, but he can’t confirm where it came from exactly since it probably landed in the sea.

“It’s so sad that this fireball most likely fell into the sea,” Daly told the paper. “If we can get the rock, we can find out where these meteoroids came from in space and piece together how our solar system is formed.”

It is not known if the fireball was part of the Perseid meteor show or if it was a “sporadic” event, Space.com reported.

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