A meteor brighter than the full moon lit the sky in the region between Cuiabá and São José dos Quatro Marcos, in Mato Grosso, this Friday morning (22). Its intense glow was seen at 2:22 am, Brasília time.
The flash was recorded by the Brazilian Meteor Observation Network (Brazilian meteor observation network), a group that monitors meteors by 102 operators from 159 stations in 20 states, and the Clima ao Vivo, a system of cameras spread across the country.
To UOL, the technical director of Bramon, Marcelo Zurita, informed that the explosion occurred at an altitude of 38 km, near Cáceres (MT), 217 km from Cuiabá. The glare was so intense that it overshadowed the full moon.
“As the meteor heats up, vaporization of the outermost layers occurs [da rocha] and as it passes through the atmosphere, it finds a more intense atmosphere. As a result, it consumes and generates heat more and more, until it ends up exploding,” explained Zurita.
There is still no information on whether the meteor was completely consumed upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere or whether any fragments reached the ground. It is also not known precisely the size of the object before the explosion, which still needs to be calculated. “The trend is that the mass has not been very large,” said the director.
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