Japan – A fireball meteor flew through the Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday, lighting up the night sky over Japan with a bright blue glow. People all around Kyushu and Shikoku saw the occurrence, and security cameras at Fukuoka Airport even recorded it on tape. Videos of the occurrence spread fast on social media, showing the meteor’s short but beautiful flare before it disappeared.
This sighting comes after Japan’s Aomori Prefecture saw a “meteoroid cluster” last week, which is a rare event when several meteors appear at the same time. This was connected to the Perseid meteor shower, which is one of the three biggest meteor showers that happen every year and is famed for its quick, bright fireballs. These happen when pieces of Comet Swift-Tuttle burn up as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
A fireball is a very brilliant meteor that is brighter than Venus. NASA says that meteors are the fireballs or “shooting stars” that happen when meteoroids, which are space rocks that can be as little as a grain of dust or as big as a small asteroid, hit a planet’s atmosphere at a fast speed and burn up because of the friction with the air.
Scientists think that about 44 tons of meteoritic debris hits Earth every day. But practically all of this stuff turns into gas in the air, leaving behind the dazzling trail that we perceive as a shooting star. When Earth goes through the dusty debris left behind by a comet, meteor showers happen. Most of the time, they are named for the constellation they seem to come from. People think the Perseids are one of the most well-known meteor showers. They are named after the constellation Perseus.