DENVER — If you were awake early Sunday morning, you might have seen a streak of light that turned night into day for a brief moment.
Several Denver7 viewers shared videos of a meteor that streaked across the night sky over Colorado around 3 a.m.
The meteor was captured on video from several areas along the Front Range. One viewer, who captured the meteor on a doorbell video feed, said the fireball lit up the entire neighborhood.
In general, most of these "fireballs" burn up quite high in the atmosphere, often 10 to 20 miles above the surface of the Earth. Few of these objects ever actually reach the ground, even though it often appears that they have hit quite close by.
The brilliant light and the colors that are seen are caused by the vaporizing of the material as it hits the Earth's atmosphere at 50,000 to 70,000 mph. The greenish color often reported is actually the glow of ionized oxygen.
