A NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) captured stunning video of a bright green explosion that occurred more than 250 miles above Earth.
Astronaut Matthew Dominick captured video of the mysterious light and asked the public for help in identifying the source of the flash.
“I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought. They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, a pretty bright one called a bolide,” he wrote on X.
A bolide is an exceptionally bright meteor, spectacular enough to be seen over a very wide area, that explodes in Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captured on video what appears to be a “bolide” meteorite exploding in Earth’s atmosphere.
Bolides are a type of “fireball,” which are meteors that reach a brightness greater than magnitude -4. That’s about as bright as the planet Venus seen in the morning or evening sky, according to the American Meteor Society (AMA).
The difference between boldies and fireballs is that boldies explode upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, like the one Dominick captured on video.
When a meteorite enters the Earth’s atmosphere, friction causes it to slow down and heat up simultaneously.
The force of the meteorite’s impact causes a “shock wave” to form in front of it. A shock wave is an expansive wave that forms when a supersonic object travels through a medium, such as atmospheric gases.
The bow shock heats and compresses atmospheric gases in front of the meteor, and some of this energy is radiated into the meteor, causing it to “ablate” (or erode) and eventually to destroy.
The resulting fragmentation increases the number of objects impacting the atmosphere and therefore enhances atmospheric ablation and causes the meteor to slow down even further.
The meteorite explodes when the force of the unequal pressures on its front and back sides exceeds its tensile strength, which is the maximum amount of stress an object can withstand before breaking.
When a meteorite destroys in this way, it is henceforth known as a “boldie.”
According to the AMA, thousands of fireball-sized meteorites are produced in the Earth’s atmosphere every day, but not all of them become fireballs.
These explosive meteorites are relatively rare and quite difficult to detect because their flashes only last a few seconds.
Dominick was lucky enough to capture this image while filming a time-lapse of the Earth as the ISS flew over North Africa.
Just after the space station passed over Cairo, Egypt, a bright explosion shone first green and then white over our planet.
“The time-lapse camera was set up over North Africa where it was very dark and there was lightning. I went over the top with the ISO (25600) and by the time the time-lapse camera reached Cairo, the cities were overexposed,” he wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“I was greedy because I wanted the core of the Milky Way. When I went to check the photos afterwards I found the bolide.”
The astronaut posted two videos of the event: a frame-by-frame time-lapse showing the flash in slow motion, and a faster-paced version.
Both show the meteorite flying over Cairo, Egypt, before bursting into flames.
Dominick launched on a mission to the ISS in March as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission.
Over the past five months, he has shared numerous photos and videos taken from his vantage point above our planet.
