Astronaut captures a meteor exploding in the atmosphere over Earth

By Georgina Torbet Published September 5, 2024

An incredible new video taken by a NASA astronaut living aboard the International Space Station shows an epic explosion over Earth. But it’s not warfare or any other man-made horror that created the bang: instead, it is thought to be a meteor exploding as it hits the planet’s atmosphere.

Astronaut Matthew Dominick has been busy with his camera this week, as he has already captured a gorgeous time-lapse video of his view from the station. But he also spotted this bright flash of teal-green light in his footage, which he slowed down to one frame per second to show the flash seen over the Nile Rver.

The object is thought to be a bolide, also known as a fireball, a type of extremely bright meteor that occurs when a piece of rocky asteroid or icy comet enters the Earth’s atmosphere and glows brightly.

I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought. They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere – a rather bright one called a bolide. Timelapse is slowed down to one frame per second for you to see it streaking and then exploding.

If you… pic.twitter.com/tn2KmWgnoE

— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) September 3, 2024

It was pure chance that allowed Dominick to capture this event, he wrote on X: “Time-lapse was set up over Northern Afric,a where it was very dark with lightning. I got greedy with ISO (25600) and when the time-lapse got to Cairo, the cities were overexposed. I was greedy because I wanted the Milky Way Core. When I went to review the shots afterwards, I found the bolide. ”

A longer and faster version of the same footage shows how the event appeared to Dominick, as a very brief flash:

Here is a longer and faster frame rate version of the timelapse. I think it is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in view like the mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes. pic.twitter.com/oQZnfAeVqg

— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) September 3, 2024

This has been a busy time for asteroids as the asteroid 2024 RW1 was also seen from the Earth’s surface this week when it burned up in the sky over the Philippines. That resulted in a bright green fireball as well, in a dramatic event that lit up the sky, though fortunately no one was hurt, no damage has been reported, and the event was declared to be harmless. This wasn’t the same event that Dominick observed though, as Dominick confirmed that his event was seen on September 2, while the fireball over the Philippines occurred on September 4.

The event in the Philippines is remarkable for another reason, as it was one of the few asteroids that was identified before it hit the planet. Astronomers spotted the object around eight hours before it struck the atmosphere, allowing them to prepare to take observations before its arrival. With increasingly sophisticated asteroid observation technology, space watchers are now able to occasionally predict the impact of objects ahead of time.