The citizens in the southwestern China were celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival when a massive meteor lit up the sky. The residents tried to catch a glimpse of the full moon, but they saw something much more beautiful!
The meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere above China, and it immediately exploded with the estimated energy equivalent of 540 tons of TNT. The flash was clearly seen, and many Chinese residents managed to take their cameras and film this spectacular event. China’s social network Weibo is flooded with videos showing the space rock tearing up the sky. At one moment, the light was so bright that it appeared as it’s early morning.
Even though it seemed like the apocalypse has commenced, it was just a small meteor which didn’t cause any damage and landed in a small village around 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside of Shangri-La, according to one of the locals. However, local news reported that it caused buildings to shake as it exploded in the sky.
NASA keeps track of these fireballs and records all of them and the most recent ones of the similar size appeared in China in 2014. There are several categories which have to be met in order for a shooting star to make it to NASA’s fireball list.
“A fireball is an unusually bright meteor that reaches a visual magnitude of -3 or brighter when seen at the observer’s zenith,” the agency explains. “Objects causing fireball events can exceed one meter in size. Fireballs that explode in the atmosphere are technically referred to as bolides although the terms fireballs and bolides are often used interchangeably.”
Meanwhile, Zhang Xingxiang, an expert from the Yunnan Observatories, Chinese Academy of Science told China Central Television Station that the meteor looked like a bolide, which, as we already said, is a very bright meteor.
