On September 21, clear skies gave residents of Scotland, Ireland, and Northern England a spectacular view of a meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. “It was flying through the air faster than a plane and the colours glowing behind it were green and blue,” said witness Tracey Norman. “It headed towards Humberside Airport, then broke up into a ray of colours. We were just gobsmacked.” Although observers initially speculated as to the object being distress flares or manmade debris, experts quickly fingered the true culprit. “[A] quick back-of-the-envelope reconstruction therefore shows that this must have been a meteoric fireball, quite likely of asteroidal origin, and we definitely can exclude a satellite re-entry,” said Marco Langbroek, physicist and astronomer of the blog Sattrackcam.
Several videos captured the event, including this one. Editor’s note: This video contains profanity.
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
Just a note: I am actually not a physicist. I am an archaeologist and high-end amateur astronomer (high-end enough to have published peer-reviewed papers on meteors).