There's been a bit more news on that amazingly bright and weird fireball seen moving across the skies of northern UK last week.
Marco Langbroek is a paleolithic archaeologist in Amsterdam, and also an amateur satellite tracker - though with modern tech, the term "amateur" is arguable. Anyway, he's been looking at the track and velocity of the meteor using eyewitness accounts (and the video taken), and thinks he can rule out the cause being the re-entry of human-made debris from a spacecraft. In fact, he thinks the meteoroid (the term for the actual object responsible for the light show) was an Aten asteroid: part of a class of rocks that orbit the Sun on paths that tend to keep them inside Earth's orbit*. The key issues here are the slow speed it moved across the sky, and the fact it moved east-to-west. That last part is really important: very ...
