An extremely rare “daytime fireball” meteor was recently spotted streaking across the clear blue skies of the eastern United States after a space rock the size of a refrigerator exploded, causing a powerful sonic boom. Experts say the anomaly could be seen from space, and small meteorite fragments may have fallen over the area.
The 6-foot-wide (1.8-meter) asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere around 8:57 a.m. EDT on Tuesday (March 17) and began burning at a speed of about 40,000 mph (64,400 kph) over Lake Erie in northern Ohio, according to a NASA report. The flaming space rock, weighing about 7 tons (6.4 tons), then shattered about 30 miles (48 kilometers) above the town of Valley City, near Akron, creating a bright flash that lasted up to seven seconds.
Multiple witnesses and security cameras recorded the explosion, and at least 200 people from states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, Virginia, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and parts of Canada reported seeing the explosion to the American Meteor Society (AMS).
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Several people along the meteor’s path reported hearing a loud bang from the sky, which was later confirmed to be a sonic boom from the smashing space rock, according to a post on social platform
The striped fireball was visible from space and was captured on camera by NOAA’s GOES-19 weather satellite, which orbits Earth at an altitude of about 22,000 miles (35,500 kilometers), Live Science’s sister site Space.com reported.
According to AMS, fireball meteors occur when falling space rocks become superheated due to high levels of friction from the surrounding air. This eventually causes the object to break apart and produce a bright flash of light.
These explosions can be very powerful. For example, the fireball likely exploded with a force equivalent to 250 tons (227 metric tons) of TNT, releasing pressure waves that “may have shaken houses” on the ground, according to the NASA report.
Most bolide meteors are discovered and better visible at night. However, the light show is so bright that it can temporarily outstrip the sun in the daytime sky. These extremely bright “daytime fireballs” are often reported along with sonic booms.
Most of the fireball debris burns up before it reaches the ground or is too small to be noticed. But particularly heavy space rocks, like the one that exploded over Ohio, can produce meteorites that crash into Earth’s surface.
“When very large meteors (beach ball size or larger) enter the atmosphere, they often survive into the lower atmosphere, where air molecules are dense enough to transmit sound,” AMS meteor observer Robert Lunsford told Space.com. Therefore, the sonic boom heard during this incident is “a good sign that the fireball produced debris on the ground.”
If there was a meteorite, AMS simulations suggest it most likely fell somewhere “near Akron,” Lunsford added.
Most of the fireball fragments land in uninhabited areas, so they pose little threat and are very difficult to spot. However, this is not always the case. For example, on March 8, just nine days before this incident, a bright fireball phenomenon occurred and about a dozen meteorites fell on a German town, one of which created a large hole in the roof of a family’s house.
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