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In a spectacular moment caught on camera, a meteor streaked across the sky in Erzurum and Gumushane in eastern Turkey. Onur Kacmaz, a passerby who had his camera on at a children’s park in the evening, captured the stunning visuals of the sky lighting up in green colour.
The short video, with a kid playing in the foreground, showed the sky mirroring what we have often seen in sci-fi films just before the arrival of a superhero or a villain. The clouds lit up momentarily caused by a meteoroid entering the Earth’s upper atmosphere and heating up due to friction, reported the Independent.
However, soon videos showing how the celestial event looked in different parts of the province circulated on social media. In a short clip recorded from the dash-cam of a moving car, the shooting star illuminated the sky before dying down.
Another clip, which appeared to have been shot from the terrace, showed the meteoroid on the city skyline, turning it green and red before descending into the darkness.
“The meteorite fell at around 20:15 local time. The fiery fragments of the meteorite during the fall lit up the sky in several provinces as if it were daytime,” a TV station reported, according to Marca.
Most meteorites are fragments of asteroids that broke apart long ago in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, according to the American Museum of Natural History.
Surprisingly, these fragments orbit the Sun, often for millions of years, before entering the Earth’s atmosphere, exhibiting laser-show-like properties in the sky.
And while it’s a phenomenon not often seen or captured on camera, the planet Earth witnesses the fall of thousands of tiny celestial rocks on its surface every year. The large impacts — like the one witnessed in Turkey — are fairly rare.
According to a report in Space.com, such events also often go unnoticed because the majority of them often land in vast uninhabited forests or in the open waters of the ocean.
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