Meteor Spotted in Skies Over Siberia: Video

A meteor was spotted Tuesday night in the skies over eastern Siberia.

The meteor was captured on video by closed-circuit TV and dashboard cameras as it flew over the city of Angarsk in Russia's Irkutsk region. The meteor most likely burned up in the atmosphere before it reached the ground, Sergey Yazev, director of the Irkutsk State University astronomical laboratory, told Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

Video clips of the incident show a very bright light momentarily streaking across the sky before fizzling out.

Meteors, colloquially known as shooting stars, are the brief streaks of light that we see in the sky when pieces of space debris enter the Earth's atmosphere at high speed and burn up. The space debris includes small fragments of asteroids or comets, which are known as meteoroids.

The majority of visible meteors are caused by particles ranging in size from that of a small pebble to a grain of sand, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS). Meteoroids that are larger—the size of a softball, for example—can be so bright that the light they produce is briefly equivalent to the full moon in the night sky.

Meteoroids enter the atmosphere at very high speeds, ranging from roughly 25,000 miles per hour to 160,000 mph. As they travel further into the increasingly dense layers of the atmosphere, they rapidly decelerate while being vaporized.

Portions of meteoroids that are sufficiently large may survive their passage through the atmosphere and strike the ground, in which case they are referred to as meteorites.

Russia is no stranger to incidents involving space debris falling to Earth, which is perhaps not surprising given the country's vast size. Earlier this year, for example, another meteor was spotted in the skies above Siberia—an incident that shares similarities with the latest sighting.

In this case, the meteor was particularly bright and was therefore referred to as a "fireball." Generally, fireballs are brighter than magnitude -4, which is around the same as the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky, according to the AMS. Fireballs that explode in a bright flash above the ground are referred to as bolides.

A notable incident involving a "superbolide" came in 2013 when a piece of space debris blew up over Chelyabinsk in Russia's southern Ural region. This event was caused by a 66-foot-wide asteroid entering the Earth's atmosphere at speeds of around 43,000 mph.

The explosion, which briefly outshone the sun, is estimated to have been as powerful as the blast created by 400,000 to 500,000 tons of TNT. It caused damage on the ground in the region and resulted in several hundred injuries.

On June 30, 1908, a huge explosion occurred in the skies above the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in a remote region of Siberia. This is considered to be the largest impact event in recorded history.

The explosion released hundreds of times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima while flattening more than 80 million trees across some 500,000 acres of forest, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The so-called Tunguska event has been classified as an impact event. But to date, no impact crater has been identified even though the damage on the ground had a clear epicenter. The event is thought to have been caused by an asteroid or other space object exploding above the ground.