A meteor shower over the North of England send social media outlet twitter into overdrive circa 11pm UK time last night as individual in the vicinity reacted to the sudden occurrence of a rarely seen meteor shower.
Said one individual who witnessed the meteor shower, Llinos Thomas:
“We were on the A55 from Chester towards North Wales and we thought we saw a firework.
“It was a massive cluster of lights in the sky, but travelling really quickly West and that’s when we realised it was a meteor shower.
“It was travelling at really high speed for ten seconds and died out and faded away.”
Reflected Colin Campbell: “I have a casual interest in astronomy and have never seen the likes of it before. It really was quite stunning, like a slow moving firework. “
Offered twitter handle users Hong Kongy Phooey and Nicole Piontkowski respectively:
“Meteor shower and a ton of stars out tonight… Absolutely amazing to see!”
“Just saw a huge fireball looking thing fall from the sky”
According to Dr Tim O’Brien, associate director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, the lights could have been from a bigger chunk of something that burned out, going on to add that the it ‘was probably orbital debris from satellites.’
It is thought that the fireworks in the sky were traveling at a speed of 18 000 mile an hour, which Dr O Brien reflected is ‘a little bit slower that the rocks and meteorites that come form farther out in space.’
Then there’s this:
bbc.co.uk: Colin Johnston of Armagh Planetarium said a meteor shower was not expected.
“It could be a bit of natural space junk which has been floating around the universe for billions of years, or it could be a man-made satellite which has burned up,”
“It will be a while before we know for sure what has happened.”
Then again as a human species in one of many planets in the universe one can really wonder what we can truly understand about what actually takes place in the universe, but at least some of us got a glimpse of it last night…
