Fireballs Over Granada

FIREBALLS over Granada. Recently fireballs have been causing a great stir on social media so here are a few facts.

On Friday residents of Granada witnessed the stunning sight of a fireball cross the sky at a staggering 83,000 kilometres per hour. The meteoroid was picked up by the SMART project detectors in Sierra Nevada that are monitored by the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics (IAA).

According to IAA expert, José María Madiedo, the phenomenon is “relatively common” as each year Andalusia sees about “about twenty meteors” that have “the intensity of the full moon”. The fireballs cause a great stir on social media as they are a fabulous sight to behold and they are monitored by the IAA observatories in Sierra Nieva and La Sagra.

Fireballs are caused by a rock that is orbiting the sun touching the atmosphere of the earth. The rocks normally come from asteroids or comets and can travel at extremely high speeds of up to 260,000 kilometres per hour. They start to heat up as they travel through the atmosphere.

As the friction increases they can heat to several thousand degrees Celsius, which in turn causes the fireball phenomenon. So from the ground it is not actually the rock that you see, but the fire from the extreme heat that is generated in the Earth’s atmosphere.

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