It may not look like much, but this聽orangey brown puff of smoke high聽is the aftermath of the聽third largest meteor explosion to have聽impacted Earth in modern times.
The huge meteor explosion hit Earth in December but聽was聽only spotted by researchers last week, and now we have visual evidence thanks to the camera of the geostationary聽.
The meteor鈥檚 smoke cloud was recorded聽at 2350 GMT in the same location over the Bering Sea that was recorded by NASA鈥檚 monitoring sensors.
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The smoke trail is almost vertical, showing that it entered the atmosphere very steeply, and it鈥檚聽possible to see a long, thin shadow cast by the smoke cloud against the Earth鈥檚 cloud layer below.
Simon Proud, an aviation safety fellow and meteorologist at the University of Oxford, who , said, 鈥淚鈥檓 sure it鈥檚 the meteor trace.鈥�
He said, 鈥淚t appears in the images at the right time, it is in the right location, the smoke column is almost vertical, and the smoke is very high.聽Much higher than any clouds in that region and too high to be a contrail.鈥�
The giant fireball hit the atmosphere with the force of聽173 kilotons of TNT, ten times the force of the atomic bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima at聽the end of the second world war.
The explosion is the third-largest聽in modern times, after an explosion over the Russian Chelyabinsk region in 2013 and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908, known as the Tunguska event.聽That air burst was so powerful that it flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.
