Fireballs reported in skies above Cuba and California

Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer, said the centre's telescopes did not pick up the object.

The reports came hours after a meteor exploded over Russia and injured more than 1,000 people and an asteroid passed relatively close to Earth.

The 55 foot wide rock, said by Nasa to have a mass of 10,000 tonnes, lit up the sky above the Urals region on Friday morning, causing shockwaves that injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes in an event unprecedented in modern times.

Nasa estimated that the energy released as the meteor's disintigrated in the atmosphere was 500 kilotons, around 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

It entered the atmosphere at 44,000 miles per hour, taking 32.5 seconds to break up at an altitude of around 15 miles above the earth's surface.

The resulting explosion created a shockwave that blew out windows and set of car alarms in Chelyabinsk two and a half minutes later.

The drama in Russia developed just hours before an asteroid - a space object similar to a tiny planet orbiting the sun - whizzed safely past Earth at the unprecedented distance of 17,200 miles.

That put it closer to the ground then some distant satellites and sent off alarm bells ringing in some Russian circles about this being the time for joint global action on the space safety front.

"Instead of fighting on Earth, people should be creating a joint system of asteroid defence," the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee chief Alexei Pushkov wrote on his Twitter account late Friday.

"Instead of creating a (military) European space defence system, the United States should join us and China in creating the AADS - the Anti-Asteroid Defence System," the close ally of President Vladimir Putin wrote.

The US space agency said the 2012 DA 14 asteroid's passing was "the closest-ever predicted approach to Earth for an object this large."

Nasa estimated that a smallish asteroid such as the 2012 DA 14 flies close to Earth every 40 years on average while only hitting the planet once every 1,200 years.

Astronomers have detected some 9,500 celestial bodies of various sizes that pass near Earth.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/579330/s/28a307e8/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cscience0Cspace0C98751490CFireballs0Ereported0Ein0Eskies0Eabove0ECuba0Eand0ECalifornia0Bhtml/story01.htm

brandon marshall ryder cup Kate Middleton Bottomless the Pirate Bay Hotel Transylvania eagles nfl schedule 2012