A small asteroid hit Earth and burned up over Siberia
Astronomers spotted a 70-centimetre asteroid hours before it hit the atmosphere above northern Siberia, making a fireball in the sky
By Matthew Sparkes
3 December 2024 Last updated 3 December 2024
An image from a webcam showing the asteroid burning up in the atmosphere above Siberia
LenskLR/YouTube
An asteroid around 70 centimetres in diameter was spotted by astronomers hours before burning up harmlessly but spectacularly in the atmosphere above Siberia.
The European Space Agency (ESA) issued an alert at 9.27 am GMT, warning that the space rock would light up the sky at around 11.15 pm local time (4.15 pm GMT) above northern Siberia.
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Speaking before the event, Alan Fitzsimmons at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK says an object this size presents no risk to those on the ground, but the early warning is a positive sign that our ability to spot these entities before they impact Earth is growing.
“It’s a small one, but it will still be quite spectacular,” says Fitzsimmons. “It will be dark over the impact site and for several hundreds of kilometres around there’ll be a very impressive, very bright fireball in the sky.”
Several objects this size strike Earth every year and we are now increasingly able to spot them early. The first was detected in 2008. The next was six years later, but the pace of observations is picking up: C0WEPC5, as today’s asteroid has been named, is the fourth predicted strike on Earth this year.
