A meteor soared across Europe—and possibly hit a house
The European Space Agency (ESA) is investigating a bright fireball that lit up the early evening sky in at least five countries on March 8. Around 5:55 p.m. local time, people in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands spotted a bright object hovering in the sky for about six seconds before disintegrating into several fragments. In the German town of Güls, about 80 kilometers west of Frankfurt, at least one house was damaged by debris.
Although more information is needed, the ESA Planetary Defense team believes it was a meteor measuring at least a few feet in diameter. And while astronomers point out that there’s not much to worry about, there’s no denying that such events aren’t exactly rare.
“Objects of this size hit Earth once every few weeks to once every few years,” the ESA explained.
Fireball over Europe, March 8, 2026
The planet is bombarded by thousands of tiny space rocks every day, but most disintegrate before impact. Encounters with larger objects are inevitable, even dramatic. In 2013, an asteroid the size of a six-story building collapsed about 24 kilometers above Russia, generating a shockwave equivalent to a 500-kiloton explosion and injuring about 1,600 residents. The most cataclysmic events – those that fundamentally change the Earth’s climate and ecosystems – are fortunately much rarer. For example, the last time an asteroid more than six miles wide hit the planet (the one that killed the dinosaurs) was about 66 million years ago.
Unfortunately, it is still extremely difficult to anticipate the arrival of meteors like the one probably responsible for the recent sightings in Europe. So far, astronomers have only managed to anticipate the arrival of meteors 11 times before. In addition to their relatively small size, it is even more difficult to spot them when they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in a region lit by daylight. Meanwhile, international agencies and government emergency response organizations are constantly trying to strengthen their capacity to coordinate and mitigate worst-case scenarios. For its part, NASA hopes to launch its Near-Earth Object Surveyor no earlier than 2027. Once deployed, the infrared space telescope will scan the cosmos for any incoming visitors that could pose a threat to Earth’s inhabitants.
The best new PopSci 2025 releases
