A fireball meteor exploded spectacularly over Europe, then rained fiery debris onto buildings in a German town, blowing holes in the roofs of houses and bedrooms below, according to reports.
On Sunday (March 8), at around 6:55pm local time, a meteor crossed the atmosphere over Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate state before suddenly exploding, creating a bright flash that lasted about six seconds, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. The light show likely means that the space rock captured on camera by Europe’s AllSky7 fireball network was “several meters” in diameter.
More than 3,000 people reported the explosion to the International Meteor Organization, including witnesses from France, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Several people reported hearing the sound of an atmospheric explosion coming from the ground.
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ESA representatives wrote that “at least one house in the German town of Koblenz Güls has been reported to have been hit by meteorite fragments.”
Local reports later confirmed that multiple buildings in the area were hit by debris. Some of these meteorites have since been collected, Live Science’s sister site Space.com reported. It is believed that no one was physically injured by the falling space rock.
The number of buildings hit by extraterrestrial debris and the total amount of damage are unknown. But German news website Bild published several photos of the town, home to about 110,000 people, including one showing a hole the size of a soccer ball in one roof. The local fire department told Bild that the stone that made the hole ended up in the bedroom, which was unoccupied at the time.
Another photo showed nine golf ball-sized stones in a brown paper bag. However, it is unclear whether these are all of the fragments collected, and whether they are true meteorites has not yet been confirmed.
According to the American Meteor Society, fireball meteors occur when falling space rocks become superheated by high levels of friction from the surrounding air. This often causes objects to fall apart and create secondary bright flashes (as seen in the latest video).
Most of the resulting debris burns up before hitting the ground or is too small to be discovered. However, in some cases, especially if the fireball breaks up close to the ground, some large pieces may remain intact before impacting the Earth’s surface.
The space rock that exploded over Germany was unknown to scientists until it entered Earth’s atmosphere. However, ESA says this is “not unusual” considering only 11 meteors have been detected before impacting Earth.
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Other close calls
It is extremely rare for a meteorite to fall into a populated area, and it goes without saying that it can affect property and people. But it’s happened before.
A space rock that punctured the roof of a Georgia home last June was later found to be older than Earth. Similar incidents occurred in New Jersey in 2023 and in British Columbia in 2021, when a meteorite crashed into the bedroom of a home. In 2022, a house in California was gutted by what appeared to be a fireball, but it remains unclear whether this was the actual cause of the fire.
In 2021, a small space rock also fell on a driveway in south-west England, charred it and was collected for analysis. A similar encounter was captured on a Canadian home’s doorbell camera in January 2025, and also captured the sound of a meteorite impact for the first time in history.
And in 2023, a French woman was hit by a pebble-sized meteorite while drinking coffee on her porch, but it is believed that she was not seriously injured. According to Smithsonian Magazine, this is believed to be the second confirmed collision between a human and a meteorite, after an Alabama woman was injured in 1954 when a large rock crashed through her roof while she was sleeping.
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