A bright fireball flashed over Portugal: it could have been a comet

A Russian astronomer commented on the phenomenon in the sky over Peru Pinheiro recorded on Sunday, May 19

The bright fireball that flashed over Portugal early on Sunday morning may turn out to be the bite of a comet. This assumption was made by Russian astronomer, discoverer of comets and asteroids Leonid Elenin.

Photo: Still from video

 An unusually large meteor (these are called bolides) rushed early on Sunday morning over  Peru-Pinheiro region in Portugal. At least, it was its residents who, after the event, began to actively post on networks many videos of a flying celestial body burning in the dense layers of the atmosphere and illuminating the dark sky with a bright flash and a long trail.

   According to some, it was bright blue, according to others – green.  Many experts suggested that a fragment, which could most likely remain after such an extraordinary event, fell in the city of Pinera. Many fans were already preparing to go in search of him. However  later a message came that the object burned down at an altitude of about 60 km above the Earth.

«It seems to me, gentlemen, that it was… car Although some people write about the supercar. Let’s look at the estimates of the visible brightness, and maybe the infrasound stations recorded something,” – wrote the famous Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin in his Telegram channel.  A little later, he also provided updated information that the speed of entry into the atmosphere of the celestial “pebble” was was about 45 kilometers per second. “And this, guys, is hardly an ordinary pebble. It is likely that we were visited by a piece of the comet's nucleus! The object burned at an altitude of about 60 km above the Atlantic Ocean.