A bright meteor unsettled many people in West Germany and Switzerland on Sunday evening. The fire department examined meteorite debris that had penetrated the roof of a house in Koblenz and did not detect any radiation.
March 9, 2026, 4:04 p.mMarch 9, 2026, 4:06 p.m
The meteor that was seen in the sky over West Germany on Sunday evening and could apparently also be observed from Switzerlandcaused a stir. A piece of debris from the meteorite that split into several pieces hit the roof of a house in the Güls district of Koblenz around 7 p.m and caused a hole about the size of a football.
The piece of debris struck the bedroom, where it damaged tiles on the floor. There were pieces of rock, sand and dust there. According to the operations manager of the Koblenz fire department, which was on site with 25 people, people were present in the house, but not in the bedroom. Nobody was injured.
The fire department also carried out measurements to rule out any danger from radioactive radiation or chemical reactions. “We measured for chemical substances and measured nuclear radiation, and we didn’t find anything,” the operations manager told the local news platform Mercuryist.
WATCH: Meteor seen in the skies over Germany and the Netherlands.
In Germany, police are reporting possible damage at homes in Rhineland-Palatinate pic.twitter.com/6DYHG4SPip
— BNO News Live (@BNODesk) March 8, 2026
Slightly larger than 1 meter
The physicist Richard Moissl, head of the Planetary Defense Office at the European Space Agency Esa, told reporters on Mondaythe event is not common and is relatively rare. It probably won’t happen again in Germany. Based on the noise, Moissl assumes that it was a meteor with a diameter of just over a meter. This is very rare for meteors.
A witness said loudly swr.de Heard a bang, “like a car collision.” Such a sonic boom often occurs when a meteor enters the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed.
The cosmic missile was not predicted because it came from the southwest on the day-night boundary, explained Moissl. Such small meteors could hardly be detected there because of the scattered light from the sun – so far it has only been possible to detect such objects from this direction eleven times.
Meteor or meteorite?
These celestial bodies usually come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and can be several billion years old. They are remnants of the formation of our solar system. As long as these objects, which are smaller than asteroids but larger than molecules, are still in interplanetary space outside the Earth’s atmosphere, they are called “Meteoroids”.
If they penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, the resulting luminous phenomenon is called “Meteor” (also colloquially “Shooting Star”). If they are brighter than Venus, they will be “Fireballs” called, even brighter ones are also called “Boliden”.
If a part of the body actually reaches the earth’s surface, these are called fragments “Meteorites”.
Up to 40 tons of cosmic debris fall to Earth every day – but the lion’s share of it consists of micrometeoroids that are smaller than 0.1 millimeters.
What happens when a meteorite hits?
When celestial bodies from outer space enter the Earth’s atmosphere, a bright luminous phenomenon can be observed from the ground that is called a “meteor” – or even a “shooting star” if it is only a small object. The initial height of these luminous phenomena is usually between 10 and 330 kilometers above the earth’s surface, and the final height is 130 to a few kilometers above the ground.
It used to be thought that the glow was caused by friction with the air. But that is not the case: it is rather caused by the ionization of the air. This is also how the well-known meteor tail is created, which can last for several minutes.
The objects, which are mostly made of rock or an iron-nickel alloy, are traveling at enormous speeds when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere – their maximum speed is 72 kilometers per second (that’s a breathtaking 260,000 km/h). The air in front of these objects is then highly compressed; enormous heat is generated. This and the air resistance can cause the bodies to break apart or explode.
When a larger object breaks apart, its entire surface area suddenly increases and the frictional heat also suddenly increases. This causes the fragments to explode, creating a large shock wave – the so-called “airburst”. This shock wave can reach the ground and cause damage.
This is exactly what happened to the big one Chelyabinsk meteoriteswhich fell on February 15, 2013 in the Russian Ural region. It was the largest known meteor (approx. 12,000 tons in mass) in more than 100 years. The shock wave damaged around 3,700 buildings – mainly windows broke. Almost 1,500 people were injured at the time, mostly from shattering glass. In the weeks and months that followed, more than 100 fragments of the meteorite were found, some weighing hundreds of kilograms. (dhr)
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