A huge meteor passed over the skies of Russia early Friday morning, triggering a sonic boom that shattered the windows of buildings, set off car alarms, and left a panicked populous in the streets of Chelyabinsk, a city located in Russia's Urals region. Approximately 1,000 we're left injured after the incident, mainly due to falling glass from the Earth-shattering boom that accompanied the meteorite. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency has stated that approximately 3,000 buildings have sustained damage and that 20,000 emergency works have since been dispatched to the streets.
Russia's national space agency, Roscosmos, has speculated that the event was caused by a single meteoroid which had entered the atmosphere and broken into several smaller fragments. The remaining fragments are believed to have landed across three different regions, one of them being the city of Chelyabinsk along with neighboring Kazakhstan. The Chelyabinsk governor had been quoted as saying that one large chunk of the meteorite had already been discovered in a lake in the Chelyabinsk region.
Shortly after the event, dozens of videos began to surface on YouTube, all revealing the same incident that occurred around 9:20AM. Some of these videos were recorded with handheld cameras while others were taken with dashboard cams, but all seem to capture the fireball that streaked across the sky and left a deafening boom in it's wake.
Scientist are leaning away the theory that this event has anything to do with asteroid 2102 DA14, the asteroid that made a near-Earth pass earlier today, but it's possible that such an asteroid did bring debris with it due to it's gravitational pull, launching much smaller objects at our planet.
You can view a large collection of videos taken of the passing meteorite here.
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