Massive Fireball Streaks Across Southern Japan, Lighting Up the Night Sky

Residents of southern Japan experienced a startling view of a bright fireball ripping across the sky, briefly turning night into day and fragmenting above the Pacific Ocean. The fireball flared to life at 11:08 p.m. local time on Aug. 19, appearing to streak southwest through the skies above southern Japan Experts say the dazzling meteor, so bright it rivaled the moon, likely plunged into the Pacific Ocean after sending shockwaves through the air that people on the ground could actually feel. Footages from Surveillance cameras and dashcams revealed the meteor emitted a series of green-blue flashes that briefly overwhelmed some camera sensors, before letting off a final flare of orange-red light and breaking apart as it neared the horizon.

What Are Fireballs?

According to NASA, such a flash in the sky is simply a chunk of space debris burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Small meteors – often called shooting stars – are bits of dust or rock that glow briefly as they collide with air. If a chunk is large and bright enough to outshine the planets, astronomers call it a fireball. The blaze occurred during the Perseid meteor shower, but experts say it's hard to know if it was connected to Perseids or just a random meteoroid (a “sporadic” event). A space museum director said the fireball was likely caused by dust or small asteroid fragments burning up in the atmosphere. NASA notes that rocks behind such fireballs can be over a metre across

Spectacular Fireball Sighting

The dazzling event was captured by multiple security and dashcam cameras across western Japan — from Kagoshima and Kumamoto to as far as Osaka (about 200 kilometres away). The videos show it streaking through the night in bright flashes of green-blue light, briefly saturating the camera sensors.
"A white light I had never seen before came down from above, and it became so bright that I could clearly see the shapes of the houses around us," Yoshihiko Hamahata, who was driving in Miyazaki Prefecture, told NHK.