A spectacular fireball was seen late Monday evening at 22:45 CEST, especially over southern Germany. 500 people have already reported their sightings, but so far very few sightings have come in from Austria, so the researchers hope for the help of the population.
Science relies on this help to calculate trajectories and recover the cosmic visitors, as Ludovic Ferrière, curator of the meteorite collection at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in Vienna, explains. He has already been involved in some meteorite salvages and has installed two special meteor cameras connected to the “AllSky7” fireball network. Behind this is a European network dedicated to collecting information about current fireball sightings.
Two such meteor cameras have already been installed on the roof of the NHM and others from the “FRIPON-Austria network” will soon be installed throughout Austria. The more observations are reported to the experts, the more accurate conclusions can be drawn about the trajectory, speed, size, nature and eventually possible impact points of the meteorite or parts of it.
In this context, Ferrière refers to an easy-to-complete online form that allows people who have observed or even filmed a possible fireball to describe their sightings and personal impressions.
According to initial information from the “AllSky7” network, Monday’s event was a “very bright fireball.” She was also caught by the cameras on the roof of the NHM. Researchers are currently working from the videos to calculate the orbit of the alien piece, as Ferrière explained.
Meteorite weighed about 260 kilograms
Experts from the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic have now been able to roughly work out the event: according to this, the meteorite had an estimated diameter of 70 to 80 centimeters and a weight of about 260 kilograms when it entered the atmosphere. The fireball became visible from a height of about 100 kilometers above the southern German cities of Ingolstadt and Regensburg. The case was no longer visible from an altitude of 35 kilometers west of the town of Höchstadt near Nuremberg (Bavaria).
Brocken drove at a speed of 1440 km/h
The piece initially moved at a speed of about 15 miles per second. The roughly six-second event was seen from Denmark to central Italy. According to Ferrière, based on the information so far, it is very unlikely that any parts will be found. These would be very small and barely identifiable even with organized search campaigns.
Such finds are generally extremely rare: on Austrian soil, a fragment of a meteorite weighing 233 grams was last recovered on July 4, 2021 in the municipality of Kindberg in Styria. The newcomer, now known as the “Kindberg meteorite”, is only the eighth find in Austria in the past 250 years and the first since 1977.
Source: Krone
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