The meteor explosion was captured on a Japanese weather satellite’s camera Description:Simon Proud, University of Oxford/Japan Meteorological Agency

It may not look like much, but this orangey brown puff of smoke high is the aftermath of the third largest meteor explosion to have impacted Earth in modern times.

The huge meteor explosion hit Earth in December but was only spotted by researchers last week, and now we have visual evidence thanks to the camera of the geostationary Japanese Himawari-8 weather satellite.

The meteor’s smoke cloud was recorded at 2350 GMT in the same location over the Bering Sea that was recorded by NASA’s monitoring sensors.


A slightly zoomed crop of the image Simon Proud, University of Oxford/Japan Meteorological Agency

The smoke trail is almost vertical, showing that it entered the atmosphere very steeply, and it’s possible to see a long, thin shadow cast by the smoke cloud against the Earth’s cloud layer below.

Simon Proud, an aviation safety fellow and meteorologist at the University of Oxford, who shared the image on Twitter, said, “I’m sure it’s the meteor trace.”

He said, “It appears in the images at the right time, it is in the right location, the smoke column is almost vertical, and the smoke is very high. Much higher than any clouds in that region and too high to be a contrail.”

The giant fireball hit the atmosphere with the force of 173 kilotons of TNT, ten times the force of the atomic bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the second world war.

A black and white image of the meteor explosion Description:Simon Proud, University of Oxford/Japan Meteorological Agency

The explosion is the third-largest in modern times, after an explosion over the Russian Chelyabinsk region in 2013 and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908, known as the Tunguska event. That air burst was so powerful that it flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.

Read more: Huge meteor explosion over Earth last year went unnoticed until now