Fireball in Berlin: Asteroid Burns Up Near German Capital, NASA Monitoring Agency Reports

It was an unusual sight for Berlin night owls. An asteroid about one meter in diameter burned up near the capital. The US space agency Nasa’s asteroid monitoring agency had previously announced the fireball at 1:32 a.m. (CET) west of Berlin near Nennhausen. Numerous pictures and videos then circulated on social media. Accordingly, the fireball itself could still be seen in Leipzig and Prague.

Nennhausen is located in the Havelland district in Brandenburg. Experts assume that amateur astronomers and curious people will set out to search for possible remains of the asteroid.

According to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the asteroid was discovered a few hours earlier by Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky. The celestial body was provisionally named Sar 2736, but is now listed as 2024 BX1. In recent years it has been possible several times to identify small asteroids before they burn up in the atmosphere.

A major threat to the region had already been ruled out before the current impact. There would only be a massive danger if asteroids with a diameter of 50 or more meters hit the Earth. Then they could reach the ground in huge pieces.

Asteroids are called small bodies, but they can be hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Astronomers classify them between the even smaller meteorites and the larger dwarf planets, although there are no clearly defined boundaries.

More than a million asteroids are known

Asteroids are pieces of rubble that, according to the current theory, were left over from the formation of planets around 4.5 billion years ago or were knocked off from planets. Since then, they have been whirring around the sun as irregularly shaped structures, particularly frequently in the so-called asteroid belt in a region between Mars and Jupiter. More than a million of these small bodies are known, but their actual number is probably much larger.

At the end of April last year, a fireball lit up over Elmshorn in Schleswig-Holstein. Shortly afterwards, chunks of the meteorite weighing a few hundred grams to several kilograms were found. A meteorite fell in France in mid-February 2023. This asteroid, which is also around one meter in size, had also been noticed a few hours earlier. In the days that followed, about a dozen pieces were found in Normandy.

2024-01-21 12:46:25
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