Bright daylight fireball April 6, 2019 above Krasnoyarsk, Russia

1 Introduction

Galina Ryabova pointed our attention at a recent daylight fireball event in Russia. On Saturday, April 6, 2019 around 18h50m local time the residents of Krasnoyarsk noticed a bright fireball moving through the sky. Some witnesses heard a noise like the sound of an airplane. The fireball dissolved in the sky and apparently nothing reached the ground. A few weeks ago, on March 15, a similar fireball was observed in the same region over Evenkia.

2 Some witness reports

The event was recorded on many mobile phones and car cams. People were wondering what they saw and discussed the videos they shared on social networks. Most people were aware that it was an exceptional bright meteor and some recalled the Evenki meteorite that fell in March.

Astronomer Vladimir Surdin, an associate professor at Moscow State University, commented that the luminous object was indeed a celestial body, a large meteoroid that entered the Earth atmosphere as a bright meteor. Thanks to the many video cameras, not a single meteor like this can pass unnoticed. The information collected by cameras is very important for science.

According to the testimony of Andrey Brownovsky in Krasnoyarsk, the object crossed the sky with great speed and had a long tail. Another resident of Krasnoyarsk, Dmitry Dmitriev, says that the object displayed a greenish light. The fireball moved so fast that most eyewitnesses had no time to take a camera to make a video or to take a photos. “I thought maybe it is a plane that was on fire. While I was getting the phone out of my pocket, it already disappeared. Most likely, it must have been a meteor” concluded Tatiana Stanovova, a resident of Solnechny.

The fireball was also observed by residents of Kansk and the Ilan district. In social networks, residents of these settlements mentioned: “It appeared blinding comparable like welding arc. Before disappearing, it broke up into small objects.” Sergey Kulishnev, a resident of Kansk, says that the fall of the object was accompanied by sound. Svetlana Sorokina reported: “It flashed and burned in the sky in front of my eyes. A very bright white and green ball, fiery, followed by a dotted line – three parts of the tail, just as bright, parallel to the ground. It did not fall but all burned. I realized that I saw it, but I hadn’t the time to record it.”

The cosmic guest was also noticed in other cities of the region, in Lesosibirsk and Zheleznogorsk. A bright white dot, then a flash of fire – it all took a fraction of a second. “We were leaving the Planet shopping center,” said Komsomolskaya Pravda, “and it flew right over our heads at a gigantic height. I saw this only on the Internet, but here it happened live … it flew from the north, in the direction of the right bank of the Yenisei.”