Watch A Fireball Light Up The Sky Moments Before An Asteroid Crashes Into Earth
A couple of days ago, NASA posted a tweet, remarking, “A tiny asteroid will disintegrate as a harmless fireball west of Berlin near Nennhausen shortly at 1:32am CET.” The heads up provided enough time for some to be on the lookout for the fireball, and then post what they captured via video on social media. Denis Vida, known as meteordoc on X/Twitter, was one of the fortunate few who captured the moment the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere.
Vida shared a 4 second clip of asteroid Sar2736, remarking about the asteroid, “a ~1m object that broke up some 50 m west of #Berlin, #Germany, and probably dropped some meteorites on the ground.”
Krisztian Sarneczky of Budapest, Hungary, was the person who first detected the asteroid, according to EarthSky. Sarneczky is also responsible for detecting an asteroid that fell over France in 2023, as well as another that entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean in 2022.
Asteroid Sar2736, later formally named 2024 BX1 by the International Astronomical Union, was only the eighth asteroid to be detected before hitting Earth. NASA does, however, have a large team monitoring for large asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. The Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) is constantly searching the skies and characterizing the orbits of all known near-Earth objects, while also predicting their close approaches with Earth. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), CNEOS provides comprehensive impact hazard assessments in support of the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
If any of HotHardware’s readers were fortunate enough to catch the recent fireball on video, or image, please feel free to share in the comment section below.
