The UK Meteor Network said it received the first reports of a fireball at around 10pm. BST and now have 800 reports and believe it was heading north over the coast between Scotland and Northern Ireland A Twitter user filmed what she thought was a “shooting star” over the town of Larbert, between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Steve Owens, astronomer and science communicator at Glasgow Science Centre, said it was a “brilliant fireball”. Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland, he said: “It was unbelievable, I was sitting in my living room at exactly 10 o’clock last night and I saw out the window to the south this brilliant fireball, this meteor going across the sky, and I could tell that it was something special because I could see through a broken cloud: it wasn’t completely visible, I could see that it was fragmented, it was breaking up, there were little pieces coming out of it.” Owens said the sighting was unusual in its duration. “Normally, if you see a meteor or a shooting star, it’s just tiny little streaks of light, they last for a fraction of a second. That streaked across the sky for at least 10 seconds, probably longer, and it traveled from the south to the west, so it was an incredible sight.” He said while it was possible it had landed, it was “highly unlikely” it was in Scotland. “Normally these tiny little streaks of light, these little shooting stars, they all burn up and all disappear and evaporate into the atmosphere, but the thing last night was bigger than a little bit of dust,” Owens said. “Last night it might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that, so it’s certainly not impossible that pieces have landed. “It looked like it was traveling quite a distance as these things do and it was pretty flat in the sky as I saw it.” Owens said the UK Meteor Network was trying to calculate the fireball’s trajectory based on hundreds of reports from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. He said: “It looked to me like it was heading west and given that people in Northern Ireland reported seeing it, it could well have gone over land and ended up in the Atlantic. It’s certainly not impossible to land: finding it will be the challenge.” Danny Nel, 21, was walking his dog in Johnstone, west of Paisley and Glasgow, when he saw the fireball. Speaking to PA Media he said: “I was walking my dog and it was quite strangely 10pm on the dot and I just saw the flash in the sky and took my phone out and recorded it. “I thought it might be fireworks at first because there was a lot of Scottish football going on, but I quickly realized it wasn’t and I just grabbed my phone to see if I could catch it.” On Thursday morning, Britain’s Meteor Network said it believed the object was possibly space debris that “would have landed in the Atlantic south of the Hebrides”.
