A powerful airborne explosion that rocked the Ukrainian capital earlier this week was most likely the product of a meteor burning up in the atmosphere.
The blast occurred late on April 19, only a few days after the start of the April Lyrids meteor shower that occurs annualy around this time of the year.
A Russian military expert named Alexei Leonkov told Sputnik that the exploding object over Kiev was likely a Lyrid meteor, with Borish Shustov, academic director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Astronomy, seconding his opinion.
The Lyrids meteor shower is going to last from April 14 till April 25 this year, with the shower’s peak being expected to take place during the early hours of April 23, the Moscow Planetarium said in a statement earlier this week.
The blast caused quite a furor in the Ukrainian capital, with air raid sirens going off in the region minutes after the explosion had taken place.
Ukrainian officials seemed uncertain about what actually happened, initially suggesting that some kind of flying object was shot down by air defenses or that it was a falling NASA satellite, though the former claim was quietly retracted while the latter claim was debunked by the US space agency itself.