Meteor explosion Milky Way Timelapse from Soulcrate Music on Vimeo.
Possibly a rare “fireball” or “bolide.” From NASA:
Fireballs and bolides are astronomical terms for exceptionally bright meteors that are spectacular enough to to be seen over a very wide area. Ground-based observers sometimes also witness these events at night, or much more rarely in daylight, as impressive atmospheric light displays.
A meteoroid is generally defined as an asteroid or comet fragment that orbits the Sun and has an approximate size between ten microns and a meter or so. Meteors, or “shooting stars,” are the visible paths of meteoroids that have entered the Earth’s atmosphere at high velocities. A fireball is an unusually bright meteor that reaches a visual magnitude of -3 or brighter when seen at the observer’s zenith. Objects causing fireball events can exceed one meter in size. Fireballs that explode in the atmosphere are technically referred to as bolides although the terms fireballs and bolides are often used interchangeably.
During the atmospheric entry phase, an impacting object is both slowed and heated by atmospheric friction. In front of it, a bow shock develops where atmospheric gases are compressed and heated. Some of this energy is radiated to the object causing it to ablate, and in most cases, to break apart. Fragmentation increases the amount of atmosphere intercepted and so enhances ablation and atmospheric braking. The object catastrophically disrupts when the force from the unequal pressures on the front and back sides exceeds its tensile strength.
Objects causing fireballs are usually not large enough to survive passage through the Earth’s atmosphere intact, although fragments, or meteorites, are sometimes recovered on the ground.
[via Reddit]