A FIREBALL, thought to be a meteor, was spotted hurtling over East Lancashire.

Police forces across the country said they received numerous calls about the suspected meteor from around 9.40pm on Saturday.

Joanne Rudge and her mum Eileen Anchors were in Roman Road, Darwen, at the Punch Bowl pub junction when the saw it.

Joanne said: “It was coming from Eccleshill and travelling very fast towards Blacksnape playing fields then disappeared.”

The Met Office tweeted: “Hi All, for anyone seeing something in the night sky, we believe it was a meteorite.”

Meteors are particles from space that burn up in a streak of light as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, whereas meteorites are larger objects that survive the trip and reach the surface of the Earth.

Dr David Whitehouse, an author and astronomer, said: “Judging by its brightness, it may have been large enough to survive and hit the ground but until people work out its trajectory we won’t have any idea where it might have come down.”

Dr Whitehouse said the object was about the size of a fist and was probably the debris of a planet that never properly formed.

”It’s a chunk of rock that’s probably come from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter has been in space for thousands of millions of years.

”There are 10s of thousands of bits of rock and grains of sand orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Some of it comes out of that orbit and some of it hits the Earth.”