A meteor spotted across the UK provoked a frenzy of excitement as astronomers said they would never forget the sighting.
They went absolutely mental. I was getting questions about what it is and is it going to end life on Earth? It was massively exciting
Eyewitnesses reported seeing a large fireball travelling from northern Scotland to southern England at around 9.40 p.m. on Sunday night.
Gary Fildes, director at Kielder Observatory, Northumberland, said he was with a group of people who went “absolutely mental” when they saw the meteor and asked him if it was going to end life on Earth.
Reports of a bright light and an orange glow were received by a number of police forces.
The Met Office tweeted: “Hi all, for anyone seeing something in the night sky, we believe it was a meteorite.”
Mr Fildes was hosting a northern lights seminar at the observatory for around 40 people when they spotted the fireball for 30-40 seconds.
“We got an incredible view. It was phenomenal,” he said.
“They went absolutely mental. I was getting questions about what it is and is it going to end life on Earth? It was massively exciting.”
Mr Fildes, who has been an astronomer for 30 years, added: “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
He described the experience as “one I’ll never forget as long as I live” but said it would be difficult to determine where the meteor came from.
“Trying to nail down the origin of the object will not be easy,”he said.
“It’s open to conjecture.”
Adrian West, of Meteorwatch, said he spotted the meteor in Berkshire and believed it could have gone down in the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay.
Mr West told the BBC: “It had a very bright orange nucleus and a green tail.
“It was seen by hundreds, maybe thousands of people.”
Meteors are particles from space that burn up in a streak of light as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, whereas meteorites are larger objects that survive the trip and reach the surface of the Earth.
David Whitehouse, an author and astronomer, said: “Judging by its brightness, it may have been large enough to survive and hit the ground but until people work out its trajectory we won’t have any idea where it might have come down.”
Dr Whitehouse said the object was about the size of a fist and was probably the debris of a planet that never properly formed.
“It’s a chunk of rock that’s probably come from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter and has been in space for thousands of millions of years.
“There are tens of thousands of bits of rock and grains of sand orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Some of it comes out of that orbit and some of it hits the Earth.”
A spokesman for Strathclyde Police said the force had been inundated with calls about a bright object in the sky across the west of Scotland.
A Durham Police spokesman said a number of calls came in around 9.45 p.m. from concerned members of the public who had seen a bright light or a fire in the sky and believed it may have been incidents involving an aircraft.
“It has been confirmed with air traffic control that there are no incidents of aircraft in difficulty and nothing registered on radar,” she said.
“The sightings are believed to be either an asteroid burning out or similar which has been restricted to the upper atmosphere only.”
Grampian Police said reports of people seeing a flare or a bright object with a tail were received from across the region.
And Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said numerous calls were made about a large ball of fire in the sky across Annandale and Eskdale.