As of Friday morning, the American Meteor Society had received 215 reports about a fireball seen over the southeastern U.S., and experts have confirmed that it was a meteor that disintegrated over the Earth.
According to the AMS, reports of the fireball came from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and even Arizona. Bill Cooke, the chief of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said the meteor was about three feet in diameter and weighed over a ton, per The New York Times.
He also said that it was first spotted around 48 miles above the town of Oxford, Ga. When it began to disintegrate, it was around 27 miles over West Forest, Ga. As it hurtled towards the Earth, it unleashed “energy of about 20 tons of TNT,” Cooke said in a statement.
“The resulting pressure wave propagated to the ground, creating booms heard by many in that area,” he explained.
Meteors are meteoroids – space rocks that often break off from larger bodies – that have entered the Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA. It said that several meteors can be seen over our planet every hour. They are sometimes called “shooting stars” and when they appear brighter than the planet Venus they are called “fireballs,” such as one seen last February near Pittsburgh, Pa.
In a Thursday X post, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellites said there had been many fireball sightings over the Southeast.
“The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (#GLM) on @NOAA’s #GOES satellites can occasionally detect these bright meteors (aka #bolides) when they pass through the atmosphere. See the quick flash #GOESEast captured around the Virginia/North Carolina border today.”
Additionally, the National Weather Service office in Charleston, S.C., posted on Facebook that there were “many reports of a #fireball across the Southeast U.S.,” at around noon Thursday.
“Did you see that fiery ball streak across the sky or feel/hear that explosion? Our agency received a notification from the National Weather Service stating it was likely a meteor, and they believe more could possibly be on the way,” said another Thursday post from the Newton County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia. “At this time, we do not have any information on where the meteor may have landed.”
Per the National Weather Service office in Peachtree, Ga., many people in north Georgia “not only felt it but saw it,” when the meteor came down.
“Numerous reports of an earthquake came in shortly after, followed by sightings and video of a flash across the sky seen as far away as Macon and Upstate South Carolina. That ‘earthquake’ was actually a sonic boom from the meteor or space junk,” it said in a Facebook post.
It went on to say that: “The Henry County Emergency Management agency passed along to us that a citizen reported that a ‘rock’ fell through their ceiling around the time of the reports of the ‘earthquake’. We are presuming that a piece of the object fell through their roof. Henry County EMA also reported that the object broke through the roof, then the ceiling, before cracking the laminate on the floor and stopping.”
NASA said that less than 5% of the original meteor object usually makes it to the ground to become meteorites. These meteorites are usually between the size of a pebble and a fist.
“In theory, the Taurids and Geminids could send meteorites down to our surface every once in a while, but no remnants have been traced to them definitively,” said the space agency.
Audacy reported on a Geminid meteor shower linked to the asteroid 3200 Phaethon last December. Taurids are meteor showers associated with the comet Encke.
CBS News reported that Thursday’s fireball could be a member of the Beta Taurid meteor shower that is typically active in late June and early July, citing Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society. This one was unusual due to the time that people reported seeing the phenomenon.
“I would estimate that we receive reports of one daylight event per month from all over the world,” he told CBS News. “I would say one out [of] every 700 fireball events involves a fireball seen during daylight hours. So these events are rare, and most people go a lifetime without seeing one.”