Science is Fun Fridays!
What we're seeing here is a meteoroid bouncing off our atmosphere on the morning of September 22 above Northern Germany and the Netherlands.
In order for this to happen, an object has to enter at a shallow angle, like skipping a rock on the water. According to the European Space Agency, it was as low as 56.5 miles in altitude, which is much lower than orbiting satellites.
An object must also maintain its speed - Earth's escape velocity is 7 miles per second.
The Tunguska event in 1908 is now believed to have been caused by one of these "Earth-grazers." A large space body hit the atmosphere, causing a shockwave which caused the explosion without any impact crater.
As a reminder: a meteoroid is a fragment of space rock, a comet or asteroid, that becomes a meteor when it burns in our atmosphere and disintegrates, and the pieces become meteorites when they land.
While thousands of meteorites have been discovered, only 40 have been traced back to their parent body. Dennis Vida, who leads the Global Meteor Network, traced this recent visitor back to a Jupiter family orbit, but no parent body as of yet.
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