Videos and photos emerged online of the extremely bright ball of light visible for hundreds of kilometres shortly after 11:00 pm (1400 GMT) local time on Tuesday.

"A white light I had never seen before came down from above, and it became so bright that I could clearly see the shapes of the houses around us," Yoshihiko Hamahata, who was driving in Miyazaki Prefecture, told NHK.

"It seemed like daylight. For a moment, I didn't know what had happened and was very surprised," he told the public broadcaster.

Toshihisa Maeda, head of Sendai Space Museum in the Kagoshima region in southwestern Japan, said that it was a fireball, an exceptionally bright meteor.

It seemed to have gone into the Pacific, he added.

"People reported feeling the air vibrate," he told AFP. "It was as bright as the Moon."

Objects causing fireball events can exceed one metre (three feet) in size, according to NASA.

Fireballs that explode in the atmosphere are technically referred to as bolides, although the terms fireballs and bolides are often used interchangeably.