Meteorite impact on 8.3.2026

Yesterday on March 8, 2026, shortly before 7 p.m., many people observed a trail of light in the sky over several federal states. It turned out to be an asteroid or meteorite passing through the atmosphere and producing the luminous phenomena through ionization and recombination of the air molecules, see also Bright light phenomenon over Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate - Astroblog in Zweibrücken.

Part of the meteorite remained whole and fell onto the roof of a house in Koblenz. The entry was recorded by 15 different stations of the AllSky7 Fireball Network Europe (the camera of the NAWI association, AMS59, is currently being repaired). Here you can see a recording of station AMS76 (Herkrath).

Meteoroids are smaller objects in space that are formed, for example, by collisions of asteroids, by eruptions and disintegration of comets, from the shell of planets. Even interstellar origin is possible. If they enter the Earth's atmosphere, they become a meteor or shooting star. If they reach the earth's surface, they are called meteorites. If they can be assigned to an observed event, they are called a fall, otherwise a find. The International Meteor Organization and the International Astronomical Union defined the lower limit of the size of meteorites as 30 micrometers and the upper limit as 1 meter.

An estimate of the fall rate is possible from photographically recorded meteor trajectories (Meteorite - Wikipedia). The data from a camera network in Canada revealed the following figures for cases over 0.1 kg per year over an area of 1.26 million square kilometers: total area of the earth: 19,000 cases; land area of the earth: 5,800 cases; per 1 million km²: 39 cases. This would result in a case rate of around 14 cases per year for the 0.36 million km² of Germany. Averaged over the Earth, we speak of a falling „flow of extraterrestrial material“ amounting to approx. 100 tons per day.

Here is a recording of the camera AMS76 (Herkenrath) of the AllsKy 7 Fireball Network Europe