Meteorites? Shooting Stars? Something supernatural? These were some of the questions that Shangri-La County residents in Yunnan Province, China, made Wednesday night as they watched in the sky three fireballs that lit up the sky in various parts of the province .
Many of the settlers were celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival and watching the largest full moon of October, when the natural spectacle was interrupted by another astrological phenomenon: something similar to a comet surfaced the sky at great speed and illuminated the zone of form unexpected.
An eyewitness told the Daily Mail website that he watched as the 'fireballs' lit the sky for at least five seconds and then fell to the ground; also explained that two of them were small in size and one was much larger.
NASA also recorded this peculiar astronomical phenomenon and reported that the lights were observed at 12:07 GTM at 28 degrees north latitude, 99 degrees east longitude and at an altitude of 37 kilometers. In addition, it moved at a speed of 14.6 kilometers per second and the explosion generated 0.54 kilotons of energy (something similar to detonating 540 tons of TNT).
Zhang Xingxiang, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Central Television Stations that everything seems to indicate that they were bolides, that is masses of cosmic matter whose large dimensions make it possible to appreciate it with the naked eye.
Its appearance is similar to that of an inflated balloon, and because it crosses the atmosphere at great speed, it burns and produces a bright light that can even be more dazzling than the Moon. That same speed causes the bolt to burst before it hits the earth's surface, in addition to the remaining pieces can disintegrate before touching the ground.
A bolide is smaller than a meteor and a shooting star, its brightness for a longer time (from a few seconds to several minutes), and it moves at an altitude much lower than the two previous bodies.
