At 11:46 p.m. in Portugal, a fireball streaked across the sky, leaving a smoldering trail of incandescent graffiti in its wake. Footage shared on social media shows jaws dropping as the dark night briefly turns into day, blazing in shades of snowy white, otherworldly green, and arctic blue.
Experts say it had a strange trajectory, not matching the sort normally taken by nearby space rocks. That's because the interloper wasn't an asteroid. It was a fragment of a comet—an icy object that may have formed at the dawn of the solar system—that lost its battle with our planet's atmosphere 37 miles above the Atlantic Ocean.
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