A small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up early Sunday morning as it hurled through the skies above eastern Germany.
Videos shared on social media throughout the day showed the glowing object’s descent over Europe, shortly after the Hungarian researcher and self-described “asteroid hunter” Krisztián Sárneczky spotted it from an observatory in Hungary.
Sárneczky is well-known for discovering minor planets and other space objects headed toward our planet, including two asteroids that respectively fell over France in 2023 and the Arctic Ocean in 2022, according to EarthSky, an astronomy website run by scientists and experts in the field.
The asteroid seen early Sunday measured about 1 meter end-to-end, according to Denis Vida, a Ph.D. associate in meteor physics at Western University in Canada and the founder of the Global Meteor Project, which aims to better observe meteors using a worldwide cooperative of cameras pointing upward to space.
Vida shared one of the clearest video clips of the falling asteroid, which was originally captured by a livestream camera set up in the German city of Leipzig, in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
The asteroid was initially dubbed Sar2736 before the International Astronomical Union’s minor planet center went on to officially name it 2024 BX1, EarthSky reported.
Funded by a grant through NASA’s near-earth object observation program, the minor planet center collects data on comets and “outer irregular natural satellites of major planets,” including their sizes and various locations, from observatories everywhere, according to its website.
