A brilliant fireball streaks across the sky of Malaga and Granada

The sky once again offered a spectacle this Monday, especially for astronomy enthusiasts, with Málaga as the stage. A rock detached from comet 1P/Halley created a fireball that was particularly visible in the skies over Málaga and Granada, although its great brightness allowed it to be seen across much of the Iberian Peninsula.

The phenomenon occurred at 2:13 AM (local peninsular Spanish time) on Tuesday, October 21. It entered the atmosphere at 243,000 kilometers per hour and was analyzed by astrophysicist José María Madiedo, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and director of the SMART project. The expert explains that it is a bolide associated with the Orionids meteor shower. When it abruptly collided with the air at high speed, the surface of the rock heated up to several thousand degrees Celsius and became incandescent. This incandescence was what could be seen as a fireball that started at about 126 kilometers above Albuñuelas, in the province of Granada.

From that point, it moved westward, finally extinguishing at an altitude of about 83 kilometers above the town of Villanueva de la Concepción in Málaga. The fireball was notable for showing several explosions along its trajectory and an intense final explosion. These explosions, which were due to various abrupt ruptures of the rock, caused sudden increases in brightness, according to Madiedo. Before extinguishing, it traveled a total distance of about 84 kilometers in the Earth's atmosphere.

This fireball has been observed by the SMART project's detection systems from stations located in Huelva, La Hita (Toledo), Calar Alto, Sierra Nevada, La Sagra (Granada), Sevilla, and Mazagón.

This is the second fireball that has been clearly spotted in recent days in Málaga after the one seen last Saturday that crossed Morocco.