A mysterious fireball seen shooting through the skies above parts of the UK earlier this week has been identified.

The UK Meteor Network received almost 800 reports on Wednesday night after the mysterious object was seen in the night sky over Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Scientists analysed video footage taken by members of the public as well as other data to determine what the “brilliant fireball” could be.

They said the object, which lasted more than 20 seconds, was “definitely a meteor”, adding “we are now 100% confident this was a small part of an asteroid”.

The network said the end of the meteor’s journey was not observed on camera, but that it ended over the North Atlantic Ocean, some 50-100 km west of the Isle of Islay, the southern-most island of the Inner Hebrides.

 

Danny Nell, 21, was walking his dog in Johnstone, near Glasgow, when he saw the fireball.

He told the PA news agency: “It was strangely enough 10pm on the dot, and I just saw the flash in the sky and pulled out my phone and recorded it.

“I thought it may be a firework at first because there was a lot of Scottish football on, but quickly realised it wasn’t and just grabbed my phone to see if I could catch it.”

Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, saw the fireball as it passed over.

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He told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “It was incredible. I was sitting in my living room at exactly 10 o’clock last night and saw out of the window, due south, this brilliant fireball, this meteor streaking across the sky, and I could tell that it was something special because I could see through broken cloud.

“It wasn’t perfectly visible; I could see that it was fragmenting, breaking apart, there were little bits coming off it.

“Normally, if you see a meteor or a shooting star, they are just tiny little streaks of light, they last for a fraction of a second. This one was streaking across the sky for at least 10 seconds – probably longer than that – and it travelled from due south all the way across to the west, so it was a pretty incredible sight.”