It seems that Norway might be having its wishes come true soon as a meteor just whizzed past Norway, lighting up the southern Norwegian sky on Sunday. Meteoroids are usually objects in space that range from dust grains to small asteroids. Sometimes they are made of iron, nickel, and minerals called Sillicates. When meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere (or that of another planet) at high speed and burn up, the fireballs or “shooting stars” are called meteors. Such a meteor was responsible for the skies of Norway lighting up at around 1 am on Sunday.
The meteor was spotted over Oslo around that time and it could be seen as far as Trondheim. Experts suspect that a piece did break off the meteor and crashed on Earth. Thankfully, no injuries have been reported due to it. A far cry from the last time something like this happened. A meteor exploded over central Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk back in 2013. It rained fireballs over a vast area and caused a shock wave that smashed windows, damaged buildings, and injured 1,200 people.
This meteor was caught by a web camera in Holmestrand, south of Oslo. It looked like a fireball flying through the sky and erupting in a bright halo of light. The footage was analyzed by the Norwegian Meteor network and they’ve been trying to find out the meteor’s origin and its final destination. According to their preliminary findings, the meteor seems to have hit Earth in a large wooden area called Finnemarka, which is around 40 miles or 60 km west of Oslo.
According to Moren Bilet from the Norwegian Meteor network, the sight was crazy to behold. He said that no debris had been found and given the ‘demanding’ location, one could take ‘some 10 years’ searching for possible meteorites. The eyewitness claimed that they even felt that the wind was stronger, meaning the meteor most likely caused a pressure wave. The meteor’s speed was around 9-12 miles/second or 15-20 km/second and it lit up the whole night sky for about five to six seconds.
Bilet said that “What we had last night was a large rock traveling likely from between Mars and Jupiter, which is our asteroid belt. What we had last night was a large rock traveling likely from between Mars and Jupiter, which is our asteroid belt”. The piece that fell to Earth has yet to be discovered so we’ll try our best to keep you updated. Hopefully, it didn’t destroy some old Japanese village because my heart isn’t ready for a real-life Your Name scenario.
It did look cool though, not going to lie.