AN ASTRONOMER says meterorite showers are commonplace - and believes the incident in Cwmbran could well be such a shower.

Dr Chris North, of Cardiff University’s school of Physics and Astronomy, said: "It is entirely possible that it was a meteor and not really that surprising.

"We get hit by meteors all the time, for example we had the Perseids meteor shower earlier in the month.

"Meteors are basically bits of space rubble, bits of asteroids or comets. Most of them are the size of a grain of sand, so shooting stars that you see for example are is something the size of a grain of sand in the atmosphere.."

Dr North said the bright light you see when you spot a shooting star or meteor shower, is caused by immensely hot air being created just in front of the rubble because the speed the rubble is travelling at. Even though the atmosphere generally protects us from meteor strikes some maintain much of their speed, with on some occasions the meteor getting so hot it explodes creating a large bang.

"There is a lot of debris in space and the Earth is orbiting the sun at around 30 kilometres per second (about 60,000 MPH) so it is a case of us hitting meteors rather than the other way round, it is what makes this not unlikely though still exciting! "

Dr North said that if anyone had seen which direction they believed the meteor was travelling they could contact the British Astronomical Association by visiting britastro.org.