With help from amateur astronomers, scientists tracked how an asteroid travelled from space, broke up in Earth’s atmosphere and sent fiery fragments shooting to the ground, gathering new information about how these space rocks disintegrate.

Asteroid 2023 CX1 briefly lit up the sky as it disintegrated over northwestern France at around 4:00 pm (1400 GMT) on February 13, 2023.

Seven hours earlier, a Hungarian astronomer had spotted the small asteroid — which was less than a metre (yard) wide and weighed 650 kilogrammes (more than 1,400 pounds) — roughly 200,000 kilometres (125,000 miles) from Earth.

In the following minutes and hours, scientists at NASA and the European Space Agency were able to calculate the location and timeline of its descent with unprecedented accuracy.

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