A space rock came hurtling into Earth’s atmosphere – and then flew straight back out again. Astronomers say this is a rare example of a “grazing fireball”.

Patrick Shober at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues observed the event in July 2017 with the Desert Fireball Network, a suite of cameras that searches Australian skies for bright meteors known as fireballs. They saw an intense trail 1300 kilometres long as the rock flew overhead at nearly 16 kilometres per second.

“The meteoroid transited the atmosphere for …