Meteor Blaze Turns Night into Day in Bucharest [VIDEO]

A meteoroid exploded over Romania's capital city of Bucharest in the wee hours of Wednesday, briefly transforming night into day.

Several security cameras all over the city caught the event, which occurred around 3:05:57am local time. Below is the footage covered by a rooftop security camera that was uploaded on YouTube.

The flash, which lasted a few seconds, left residents of Bucharest shocked.

The Romanian Space Agency (Rosa) later said that the rare event was the result of a meteoroid penetrating through the Earth's atmosphere that was recorded at an altitude of 31-43 miles (50 – 70 km), over Bucharest and Vrancea.

"This phenomenon is widespread, only last evening about 30 meteors like this a single were monitored in the United States of America, the only nation that has an operating monitoring method for such objects," mentioned Marius-Ioan Piso, president of the ROSA, is a press statement, Finditwestvalley.com reports.

It is not clear whether this meteoroid actually become a meteorite. But the Agency states that most probably the small rocky or metallic body burned in the atmosphere and did not cause any harm to the surrounding infrastructure.

Experts say that each day, Earth's atmosphere is hit by more than 40 tonnes of meteoroids. Most are just tiny particles of comet dust that fall on Earth like a slow drizzle of meteors during night time, but it doesn't harm anyone.

Most of us are not aware of the difference between a meteor, meteoroid and meteorite. A meteor is a flash of light in the atmosphere when the debris burns up, while the debris itself is known as a meteoroid. If this meteoroid successfully enters the Earth's atmosphere, it is known as a meteorite. These originate from asteroids and comets.

Our planet is very vulnerable to asteroids and NASA has estimated that just 1 percent of the millions of asteroids in our solar system have been found. However, there is no need to worry, because previous records suggest that most asteroids encountering the Earth either explode in the atmosphere or land at sea. As many asteroids go unrecorded, researchers cannot tell for sure when one is going to hit the Earth.