A fireball meteor exploded spectacularly in the sky over Europe before raining flaming fragments over buildings in a German city – punching a hole through the roof of a house and into the bedroom below, according to reports.
On Sunday (March 8), around 6:55 p.m. local time, a meteor streaked through the atmosphere over the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate before suddenly exploding, creating a bright flash that lasted about six seconds, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The light show probably meant that the space rock, caught on camera of Europe’s AllSky7 fireball network, was “several meters” in diameter.
More than 3,000 people – including eyewitnesses in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – reported the explosion to The International Meteorological Organization. Several people also reported hearing the atmospheric explosion from the ground.
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ESA representatives wrote that “at least one house in the German city of Koblenz-Güls is reported to have been hit by small pieces of the resulting meteorites.”
Local reports have since confirmed that several buildings in the area were hit by fragments. Some of these meteorites have since been collected, Live Science’s sister site That was reported by Space.com. No one is believed to have sustained physical injuries from the falling space rocks.
It is unclear how many buildings were hit by extraterrestrial debris or what the total extent of damage is. However, German news site Bild shared more photos from the city, which is home to around 110,000 people, including a photo of a football-sized hole in one roof. The local fire department told Bild that the stone that punched this hole ended up in a bedroom, which was unoccupied at the time.
Another photo showed nine golf ball-sized rocks in a brown paper bag. However, it is unclear whether these were all the fragments collected, and they have yet to be confirmed as true meteorites.
Fireball meteors occur when falling space rocks are overheated due to high levels of friction from the surrounding air, according to American Meteor Society. This often causes the object to break apart, creating a secondary bright flash (as shown in the last video).
Most of the resulting fragments burn up before hitting the ground or are so small that they are never found. However, sometimes a few larger pieces may remain intact before impacting the planet’s surface, especially when the fireball breaks apart near the ground.
The space rock that exploded over Germany was not known to scientists until it entered the Earth’s atmosphere. But this is “not unusual”, given that only 11 meteors have ever been discovered before we hit our planetaccording to ESA.
Other close calls
It is extremely rare for meteorites to land in populated areas, let alone impact property or people. But it has happened before.
Last June, a space rock punched a hole through the roof of a Georgia home and stayed later discovered to be older than Earth. Similar events have also seen meteorites crash into the bedrooms of homes in New Jersey in 2023 and British Columbia in 2021. And in 2022, a house in California burned down after being hit of a suspected fireball fragment – although it remains unclear whether this was the true cause of the fire.
A small space rock too landed on and burned off a driveway in south-west England in 2021 and were collected for analysis. A similar meeting was filmed on a doorbell camera in a Canadian house in January 2025, which also captured the first ever sound of a meteorite impact.
And in 2023, a French woman is believed to have been directly hit by a pebble-sized meteorite while drinking coffee on her porch, without causing any real harm. This is believed to be only the second confirmed case of a human-meteorite impact, after an Alabama woman was struck and injured by a heavy rock that crashed through her roof while she slept in 1954, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
