Residents in Dumbarton and the Vale were stunned to spot a “fireball” lighting up the night sky last night.
The UK Meteor Network said it began receiving reports of a fireball being spotted over Scotland and Northern Ireland on Wednesday night.
People across the area took to social media, with one man posting: “Anyone see something flying across the sky over Renton about 10pm tonight?”
Replies included one woman who posted: “I saw it was very fast, glad it wasn’t my imagination. Passed across my window, then over Carman Hill. Definitely looked like a comet.”
Another said: “I seen it in Castlehill think it was a comet! Was so close to us.”
One person thought it was a shooting star, saying: “I seen it in the Vale, thought it was a shooting star but was very bright.”
The UK Meteor Network said this morning they believed it was space debris, posting on Twitter: "Having studied many videos of last night's fireball over Ireland, Northern England and Scotland, we are if the opinion this was space debris."
Steve Owens, astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, saw the fireball as it passed over Scotland on Wednesday evening.
He told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “It was incredible. I was sitting in my living room at exactly 10 o’clock last night and saw out of the window, due south, this brilliant fireball, this meteor streaking across the sky, and I could tell that it was something special because I could see through broken cloud.
“It wasn’t perfectly visible; I could see that it was fragmenting, breaking apart, there were little bits coming off it.
“And normally, if you see a meteor or a shooting star, they are just tiny little streaks of light, they last for a fraction of a second, This one was streaking across the sky for at least 10 seconds – probably longer than that – and it travelled from due south all the way across to the west, so it was a pretty incredible sight.”
He said it is possible it could have landed but added it is “highly unlikely” it landed in Scotland.
He said: “Normally these tiny little streaks of light, these little shooting stars, they all burn up and everything just vanishes and evaporates in the atmosphere, but the thing last night was bigger than a little bit of dust.
“The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that, so it’s certainly not impossible that bits could have landed.
“It looked like it was travelling a fair distance, as these things do, and it was fairly flat across the sky as I saw it.
“The UK Meteor Network, which has had hundreds of reports from around Scotland and further afield, is going to be able to triangulate all of those reports to work out its trajectory.
“It looked to me like it was heading… it was certainly heading towards the west and, given that people in Northern Ireland were reporting seeing it, it could well have passed over land and ended up in the Atlantic, but it’s certainly not impossible that it landed – finding it will be the challenge.”
