'Spectacular' asteroid blazes over Siberia just hours after it was detected

A small asteroid lit up the skies over northern Siberia today (Dec. 4) after burning up in Earth's atmosphere in a "spectacular" (yet harmless) fireball.

Astronomers spotted the space rock, measuring 28 inches (70 centimeters) in diameter, in the early hours on Wednesday local time, just hours before the space rock entered the atmosphere.

"Thanks to observations from astronomers around the world, our alert system was able to predict this impact to within +/- 10 seconds," the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

C0WEPC5, as the asteroid has been temporarily named, entered Earth's atmosphere at 1:15 a.m. local time on Dec. 4 over Russia's remote Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia. Local officials were placed on alert, the Sakha emergencies ministry noted, but no damage was reported during the event.

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Footage of the fireball was shared by the Sakha Republic Ministry Of Internal Affairs on Telegram. The footage was from colleagues at the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Olekminsky District and city residents.

NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) spotted the space rock 12 hours before it entered our atmosphere, ESA said, making it the fourth so-called "imminent impactor" detected so far this year, and the 11th one detected overall, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com.

The first asteroid to be detected and tracked in this way was a 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide) space rock called 2008 TC3, which broke up above Sudan in October 2008. But the system didn't detect another one until January 2014, when Arizona's Mount Lemmon observatory noticed meteoroid 2014 AA several hours before it streaked through our skies. However, since then, our ability to find these impactors has greatly improved and space agencies are now detecting several imminent impactors every year.

While asteroids like C0WEPC5 pose no threat to the planet, having these detection systems in place gives astronomers the opportunity to identify and deflect larger and more dangerous objects on a collision course with Earth.

As a result, both NASA and ESA have dedicated programs for spotting and tracking these near-Earth objects. Fortunately, no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next 100 years.