Videos posted to social media and on the International Meteor Organization (IMO) website show a bright ball in the night skies over northern parts of the U.K., emitting a greenish light and leaving behind a trail of debris.
The object appeared to be a fireball—a particularly bright type of meteor that burns intensely as it slams into Earth’s atmosphere from space, heated up by air resistance.
“Not very often a meteor flies past your house,” wrote Twitter user Mark Rae who posted a clip from the town of Saltcoats, Scotland.
Other eyewitnesses shared their experiences on the IMO website, where more than 870 reports had been logged as of Thursday morning. Most had come from Scotland, though some people reported being able to see the fiery object from parts of England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
“Brightest and longest-duration of a meteor I’ve ever seen,” wrote one person who said they saw the object from Ratho, Scotland.
“Bits seemed to break off and follow the main fireball for the whole time I saw it,” reported another eyewitness from Cardoness, Scotland. “After breaking off they would increase in intensity. Many of the bits that broke off were green but there were also yellow and orange bits, like the main fireball.”
One person in Armagh, Northern Ireland, even reported hearing what they described as “two bangs very close together after one minute of seeing the fireball.”
However, rather than the object being a blazing space rock, the U.K. Meteor Network—a community of citizen scientists who operate a network of meteor-detection cameras around the country—has speculated the object was actually man-made.
“Having studied many videos of last night’s fireball over Ireland, northern England and Scotland, we are of the opinion that this was space debris,” the group tweeted on September 15.
If this was the case, it is unclear what the space object might have been and where—or if—it might have landed. The U.K. Meteor Network said the object “would likely have burned up in the atmosphere” before hitting land or sea.
However, the group also tweeted that if the object did make it through the atmosphere then it would have landed in the Atlantic Ocean, south of the Hebrides archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland.
Space debris has made several headlines in 2022, with pieces of rocket belonging to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX slamming into an Australian sheep farm in July and Chinese rocket debris causing concerns because of multiple uncontrolled de-orbits this year.
