An Illinois police officer has captured the moment an extremely rare fireball illuminated the night sky. The video was inadvertently taken by a Woodridge Police Department car’s dashboard camera video. Sergeant Chrusciel was near the 75th St./Interstate 355 intersection facing east when the fireball appeared.
The meteor is clearly seen cruising across the sky from left to right.
While the fireball was bright, the police officer’s view was lucky.
Jim Hoff, a Village of Woodridge management analyst, wrote: “The city did not receive any reports.
“The meteor occurred early in the morning, and many people were likely sleeping.”
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The police department posted the dashcam footage on Facebook at 5.42am local time then added it to the department Twitter account.
Mr Hoff added: “The meteor video reached more than 40,000 people on Facebook, making it our most viewed video.”
Meteors, also known as bolides, are cosmic debris that explode in the atmosphere.
The resulting fireball can become more than twice as bright as the Full Moon.
US space agency NASA is on the hunt for larger space rocks that could pose a threat to life on Earth.
But so far, the agency’s Planetary Defence Coordination Office has not identified any imminent threats.
Larger fireballs are rare, but when they do happen, they can cause extensive damage.
A prominent example was the 2013 Chelyabinsk event, in which a meteor the size of a six-story building broke up over a town in Russia.
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The pressure wave during the meteor’s descent shattered glass and injured more than 1,000 people.
And in December last year, an incoming space rock detonated 16 miles (26 km) above the Bering Sea’s icy waters, generating 173 kilotons of energy.
This is the equivalent to 10 times the amount unleashed by the atomic bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War 2, NASA officials confirmed.