Spectacular fireball streaks across western Japan, lighting up night sky

An intense ball of light, widely believed to be an exceptionally bright meteor known as a fireball, was seen across western Japan late on Tuesday night.

The fireball was captured on surveillance cameras and car dashcams on Kyushu, the southwesternmost of Japan’s main islands, as well as in other parts of western Japan, including Osaka. Footage, which was widely shared on social media, showed a bright light that turned the sky white for a few seconds at 11.08pm (2.08am yesterday, NZ time).

“What I saw in the videos was amazing, stunning – a beautiful live show in the sky,” Luke Daly, a professor of planetary geoscience at the University of Glasgow, said yesterday.

Fireballs are large, bright meteors produced when meteoroids – space rocks – enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds and under incredible friction, generating a large amount of heat that gives them their exceptionally bright glow.

A fireball was bigger, brighter and more long-lived than the average meteor, Daly said. “A meteor is, like, blink and you miss it, but fireballs are like, ‘That’s incredible!’”

Fireballs could be made up of fragments of asteroids, space junk or comets, and could vary from the size of a fist to a basketball, Daly said. Given the speed at which it was falling through the sky, he believed the fireball seen in Japan was most probably from an asteroid.

In June, a fireball was seen over the southeastern United States. While most sightings were reported in Georgia and South Carolina, some saw the fireball in Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina.

On the southern tip of Kyushu, some residents of Kagoshima and Hioki told news media that they heard a loud explosion-like sound at the time of the fireball sighting. This was a sonic boom, Daly said. While such sounds were relatively rare, they could happen when a large meteoroid travelled faster than the speed of sound while entering the atmosphere.

Daichi Fujii, a fireball expert at Hiratsuka City Museum, told Japanese news outlet Asahi Shimbun that he believed the fireball entered the Earth’s atmosphere at about 21km per second and fell into the sea south of Kyushu.

“It’s so sad that this fireball most likely fell into the sea,” Daly said. “If we can get the rock, we can find out where these meteoroids came from in space and piece together how our solar system is formed.”