Video footage has captured the incredible moment a meteor tore through the skies of Lapland, Finland, turning night into day and causing a noticeable blast. The incident happened on Thursday, November 16, and was seen on camera by a number of locals. The meteor shines incredibly brightly, but it’s not known if it hit the ground or exploded in the atmosphere.
“So
tonight whilst I was sat in our cottage, there was a huge bang and the cottage
shook violently,” Tony Bateman, who recorded one of the videos and runs the
website Aurora Service Tours,
said in the video description.
“We
run a live video stream capturing the night sky for aurora borealis purposes, I
immediately think maybe that caught the show? So I rewind the video and sure
enough, there it is. Absolute goosebumps at this stage. “What a night.”
The incident is thought to
have happened at about 6.40pm local time in the skies of Inari in Finnish
Lapland. The incident was so bright and powerful that there were some reports
it was even heard in Norway and Russia.
“The lights came from
all around us, like a massive explosion that lasted for some five or six
seconds,” eyewitness Atle Staaleen told the Barents Observer.
While the event is
impressive, meteors are not all that rare. Thousands of objects burn up in our
atmosphere every year, but many are too small to be noticeable. Others take
place over remote, uninhabited areas.
On some occasions, though, a
meteor can streak over a populated area. In the case of this incident, the
meteor looks like it either exploded in the air as a bolide, or hit Earth as a
meteorite. We’re getting better at tracking meteorites, but we’re not perfect
yet. The often used example is the Chelyabinsk meteor over
Russia in 2013, which went undetected but injured hundreds of people when it
exploded.
Thankfully, we don’t seem to
have had a repeat this time around. But it’s a good reminder that there's a lot
of stuff hitting our planet, and we need to make sure we're prepared if
anything big does come our way that could pose a threat.