A chunk of a comet unexpectedly lit up the night sky over Spain and Portugal — stunning onlookers and alarming European planetary defense officials.
A chance video clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, showed a young person's shocked reaction when the fireball flew overhead and exploded in the Earth's atmosphere Saturday night.
"My God," the person said in Portuguese. "Damn! What the f--?"
The European Space Agency also posted a video clip of the shooting star as it traveled over a "fireball camera" in Cáceres, Spain.
The agency said its Planetary Defence Office was "analyzing the size and trajectory of the object to assess the chance that any material made it to the surface."
In an update, the ESA said that the fiery phenomenon appeared to be a "small piece of a comet" and that it was traveling more than 100,000 mph when it passed over Spain and Portugal before burning up about 37 miles above the Atlantic Ocean.
"The likelihood of any meteorites being found is very low," the agency wrote.
The incident took place at 11:46 p.m. in Portugal, according to the New York Times, which said the cosmic snowball plunged toward the planet at more than twice the speed of a typical asteroid and on a different trajectory than most space rocks take.
The Times also quoted Juan Luis Cano of the Planetary Defence Office, which monitors the skies for potentially dangerous "near-Earth objects," as lamenting that officials were caught unawares.
"It would have been great to detect the object prior to colliding with the Earth," Cano said.
Comets are composed of frozen gases, rock and dust that orbit the sun and date to the formation of the solar system, according to NASA.
They range in size from a few miles to 10 miles wide but can grow larger than a planet as they approach the sun and heat up, spewing gases and dust that creates a glowing head and a tail that stretches millions of miles.
