A team of scientists discovered the source of the space rock by carefully tracing dashcam footage taken from a spectacular fireball that was seen in central Europe in February 2020.
A handful of cameras were set up across Slovenia, Croatia and Italy to capture the fireball that appeared at 10:30 a.m. local. The footage showed a space rock breaking down into 17 smaller pieces in an airburst event. This is when an asteroid passes through Earth's atmosphere and explodes before reaching the surface.
Three pieces weighing in at 1.6 lbs each were found by local residents near Novo Mesto in Slovenia. (720 grams). The footage shows a fragment that is potentially as large as 2 lbs. Researchers say it is not one of them, weighing in at 10 kilograms.
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Here's a screenshot of the system scientists used in order to match still images with footage from a February 2020 fireball. (Image credit: Denis Vida et al.)
A team of scientists gathered footage from the event to help understand it better. This would normally be done by following a fireball's path through the stars, but this meteor fell during daylight.
The scientists then asked local residents to take photos of the landmarks featured in the videos. The researchers created a path to the space rock by combining footage from the fireball, sky images, and footage from a known light source, all filmed with one of the same cameras as the fireball.
Although the path suggests that the meteor could have come from an asteroid near Earth, scientists aren’t certain.
The scientists were able improvise ways to use their observations for the fireball but they would prefer that future meteors in this area arrive overnight since central Europe is full of overnight cameras.
"The path of the fireball is in a volume in the world's sky that has been most closely observed by specialist night-operating camera specialists," Denis Vida, a Canadian planetary scientist, stated in a statement by the Europlanet Society. Vida presented his research at the annual conference on Tuesday, Sept. 21. "Its path would've been captured by at least 20 if the event had occurred a few hours earlier."
