A bright green meteor was seen crashing through the atmosphere, illuminating the clouds above Yakou, a famous mountain pass in Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range
A bright green meteor was filmed crashing through the atmosphere and illuminating the clouds in a rare clip. The video showed the bolide, an exceptionally bright meteor, streaking across the night sky and growing in intensity.
It then turned bright green and lit up the clouds hanging over the mountain range. The fireball was filmed blazing across the sky above Yakou, a famous mountain pass in Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range.
The phenomenon was live-streamed by the Taitung County Government on Tuesday night, December 16.
Pu Min-cheng, director of Taitung County’s Transportation and Tourism Department, confirmed the object was a bolide entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
He said they usually produce a sonic boom and explode, leaving a glowing trail across the sky. They can also burn so brightly that they are visible during the day.
Pu said bolides are “typically brighter and longer-lasting than ordinary meteors”. He also pointed out that cameras have captured bolides streaking across the sky in the area before, but only on clear nights. He had never seen one light up the clouds before.
One local said: “This is the best congratulations for restoring the camera signal on the mountain pass.”
Another added: “No wonder the sky over Taichung City lit up briefly on Tuesday, my view was blocked by buildings so I thought it was just fireworks.”
It comes as the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which gripped the world in recent months, passed Earth no closer than about 170 million miles (275 million km) to our planet.
Several NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft, including those near Mars and the Juice spacecraft, observed the comet during its passage.
Loeb, a professor of science at top US university Harvard, had previously warned that ignoring the anomalies could lead to comet experts miss “important opportunities” to learn more about the universe.
His theory that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS might be alien technology sent to observe Earth attracted global headlines and listed a swathe of anomalies which suggested it could be technological in nature, rather than a comet like most boffins believed.
But he told NewsNation: “At this point, given all the data that we have, I would agree that it’s most likely natural, but there are still a lot of things we don’t understand about it.”
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