Fireball in night sky likely to have been space junk

"It travelled from due south all the way across to the west. It was a pretty incredible sight."

He said it was unlikely, but not impossible, that it would have reached the ground, and may have reached the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr Owens said: "Normally these little shooting stars burn up and everything vanishes and evaporates in the atmosphere, but the thing last night was bigger than a little bit of dust which causes normal shooting stars.

"The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe even bigger than that.

"It is highly unlikely it fell anywhere in Scotland but if you are looking for a bit of space debris - a meteorite as it's known - you are looking for a magnetic object, something that looks like a rock but is magnetic."

James Williams saw it from his front garden in the southside of Glasgow and managed to record it on his mobile and his doorbell camera. He described it as being "all different colours like a firework but silent".

Danny Nell, 21, was walking his dog in Johnstone, just west of Paisley and Glasgow, when he saw the fireball.

"I was walking my dog and it was strangely enough 10pm on the dot and I just saw the flash in the sky and pulled out my phone and recorded it," he told the PA news agency.

"I thought it may be a firework at first because there was a lot of Scottish football on but quickly realised it wasn't and just grabbed my phone to see if I could catch it."

Dr Aine O'Brien, from the University of Glasgow and the UK Fireball Alliance, said they still did not know for certain what the fireball was and urged people to report their sightings on their website.

She said: "Hopefully it was a meteorite and given how long it went for, maybe we've got the first Scottish meteorite in over 100 years."

Scientists will use the videos of the fireball to triangulate where it came from and track where it would have landed if it didn't burn up in the atmosphere, Dr O'Brien said.

She said it was not something to worry about.

"It's just a wonderful, beautiful thing. We getting shooting stars, meteors all the time."

Dr O'Brien added that it was just "lucky" that the weather conditions and the timing of the fireball meant many people could see it and record it.

Dr Marc Sarzi, head of research at the Armagh Planetarium, said the fireball was a "very spectacular one" but he did not think it was a "major event".

He said meteor showers made of little particles left behind by comets normally occur over the summer

If this fireball was caused by a meteor, it "would probably leave behind a nice piece of asteroid," he said.