Brilliant green meteor lights up the skies over United Kingdom (video)

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The best views came from Scotland, northern Ireland and the coast north of Manchester.

A green-tinged fireball lit up the skies over the United Kingdom late Wednesday (Sept. 14).

An incoming meteor (or bunch of space debris, which some experts say it may be) broke up between Scotland and northern Ireland within view of much of the United Kingdom, which has a population of nearly 70 million people.

More than 1,000 reports flowed in to the American Meteor Society despite the late hour, including a collection of photos and videos of the fireball event. Dozens of reports and videos also appeared on Twitter, as you can see below, from dashcams, doorbell cameras and mobile phones.

Related: Brilliant yellow-green fireball lights up sky above England (video, photos)

Viewer Paul M. shared this view of a fireball on the American Meteor Society's website. It was spotted Sept. 14, 2022. (Image credit: Paul M.)

A late-night fireball in the United Kingdom is visible over houses on Sept. 14, 2022. (Image credit: Stephen Mcknight)

One viewer joked that the universe was celebrating their newly minted Ph.D.

AMA's initial computer trajectory suggests the fireball first appeared north of Loch Ryan (roughly a two-hour drive southwest of Glasgow) and disappeared north of Islay Island, further north along the coast of the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom meteor network reported 800 viewings of the fireball in the early morning hours, adding their experts suspect it is space debris.

Given the length of the reported event, at 19 seconds, astronomer Will Gater said on Twitter also said he suspected the fireball might be a space debris event. Jonathan McDowell, a debris observer based at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted it may be SpaceX Starlink satellite 4653, "but my estimate had it going a bit to the south of the U.K."

Gater also wrote an article for New Scientist, and spoke with University of Glasgow planetary scientist Luke Daly; Daly, a member of the UK Fireball Alliance, said there is "a reasonably high chance that this is space junk" based on metrics such as its slower speed, "shallow entry angle [and] a substantial amount of fragmentation."

Regardless of the fireball's origin, the event was harmless as it took place dozens of miles (or kilometers) high in the atmosphere. No astronomical society has yet reported whether it generated meteorites, which rarely happen when a space rock naturally breaks up in the atmosphere and portions make it to the ground.

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Elizabeth Howell
Elizabeth Howell
Former Staff Writer, Spaceflight (July 2022-November 2024)

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., was a staff writer in the spaceflight channel between 2022 and 2024 specializing in Canadian space news. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years from 2012 to 2024. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House, leading world coverage about a lost-and-found space tomato on the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022) is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams.