A blue-green light appeared during the night from Saturday to Sunday, May 19, in the skies of Portugal and Spain. Local emergency services received the calls in question. The origin of this phenomenon remains uncertain.
Interesting scene. During the night of Saturday to Sunday, May 19, a blue-green light appeared in the Spanish and Portuguese skies, a moment captured by some curious people and whose photos were then widely shared on social networks. The origin of this phenomenon is currently unknown.
Many videos or photos posted on the X social network show intense white light with blue-green hues quickly crossing the sky within a few seconds.
This phenomenon was seen in particular in Madrid and the regions of Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura and Galicia in Spain and in Lisbon in Portugal. This could have happened at 10:46 p.m., according to the Portuguese newspaper Publicowhich cites the National Civil Protection.
Concerned calls to emergency services
Madrid's emergency services said they received several phone calls in the evening from concerned people, saying they saw a green flash in the sky, Spanish news agency Europa Press reported. El Pais.
The same is on the Portuguese side, where Publico confirms that the Portuguese Civil Protection also received calls of the same type. The newspaper confirms that emergency services mentioned a “meteorite fall” on its website, before withdrawing its publication. Civil Defense, contacted by the newspaper, did not provide further information about what happened.
After receiving the first call of the night shortly after midnight reporting a falling object, Portuguese firefighters went to the Serra de Montemurro area, but found nothing there.
At present, it is impossible to say that it is a meteorite, meteor or other phenomenon, and the origin of this light has not been officially determined.
Visible 800 km away
Physicist José María Madedo, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics in Andalusia, talks about an “amazing fireball” in a message he posted on his X account.
He asserts that it was produced “by a rock coming from a comet.” “The rock entered the atmosphere at a speed of 161,000 kilometers per hour,” he wrote. Thanks to the high intensity of illumination, “it turned night into day for a split second,” he emphasized, and was visible 800 kilometers away.
It was supposed to appear at an altitude of 122 kilometers above the ground from the town of Don Benito in Spain, then cross Portugal from east to west, before ending its path at an altitude of 54 kilometers, above the Atlantic Ocean.
“The rock crumbled along its path,” but its fragments likely “disintegrated in the atmosphere,” making the possibility of finding pieces on Earth very low, according to the scientist.
