Numerous people watched on saturday evening as a fireball passed over the center of germany. "Within a few hours we had about 90 entries on our registration address", confirmed jurgen oberst from the fireball net on sunday.
The reporting address that oberst addressed is a joint project of the german center for aeronautics and space (DLR) and the technical university (TU) berlin. "The reports all refer to an event at about 18.40 o’clock, and most of the reports come from the area koln-frankfurt-stuttgart."
"It was most likely an asteroid fragment that entered the atmosphere," explained the technical director of the DLR fireball network, dieter heinlein. The rather coarse lump was around 18.41 o’clock flew from east to west over about kassel. The exact gross is still unknown.
Such reports of fireballs are particularly frequent in november and december, heinlein said. Over austria on 19. November already a similar chunk plunged into the atmosphere, from which then individual pieces fell to earth. It is still unclear whether this has now also happened in germany.
"Very bright fireball from dusseldorf-ludenberg towards mettmann. It then disintegrated into several parts. Time 18:40h", wrote a celestial observer to the "rheinische post", as it reported on sunday.
An observer from siegen reported according to oberst of a bright ray moving along the sky, which had changed into a green jade-like color. The coarse part apparently broke up, and two smaller brightly shining spheres came off. The duration of the sighting was at most five to seven seconds.
But also in the north of germany the celestial phenomenon could be observed. "Sighting of a bright object flying from west to east with a green tail. Tail 3-4x as coarse as the object, with detachment of smaller parts", wrote a man from schleswig-holstein on a page of the observatory gahberg (austria).
According to DLR, asteroids are small bodies left over from the time when planets were formed. In our solar system, most of them are to be found in the so-called asteroid belt between the planetary orbits of mars and jupiter. However, collisions in this area produce fragments that can also cross the earth’s orbit and create fireballs as they plunge into the atmosphere.
