An asteroid weighing about 7 tons and traveling at 45,000 miles per hour zoomed over multiple states and lit up the sky as a meteor Tuesday morning, causing a loud boom that some residents mistook for an explosion, officials said.
NASA said eyewitnesses from 10 states, Washington, D.C., and the Canadian province of Ontario reported seeing the “bright fireball” moments before 9 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh shared an employee’s video of the meteor arcing across the sky.
Witnesses in Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania also reported hearing a loud boom or explosion sound, according to CBS affiliate WOIO. One person told the station that the boom shook their whole house.
NASA said the sound occurred when the asteroid fragmented, “resulting in a pressure wave” that reached the ground. The chunk of space rock unleashed an amount of energy equivalent to 250 tons of TNT when it fragmented, NASA said. The space agency confirmed the boom would have been loud enough to shake some homes.
The National Weather Service identified the item as a meteor earlier Tuesday. Any small space object that enters Earth’s atmosphere is described as a meteor. A weather service instrument called a geostationary lightning mapper identified the meteor. The device detects quick flashes in the atmosphere and is usually used to continuously map lightning strikes, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It can also identify meteors, which are bright and flash similarly to lightning.
The NWS shared a photo of the instrument detecting a green flash over Cleveland.
Data analysis shows that the asteroid would have first been seen about 50 miles above Lake Erie, off the coast of Lorain, Ohio, NASA said. It would have then moved east of south at 45,000 miles per hour, traveling over 34 miles through the upper atmosphere before fragmenting over Valley City, Ohio.
NASA said fragments from the meteor would have scattered around Medina County, Ohio.
“Some fragments, some tiny pieces of it, actually made it to the ground,” Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, told CBS News.
Cooke, who charts plummeting space objects for NASA when they’re big enough, said the meteor was about 6 feet in diameter, and it was too small to track.
“This could just be a small asteroid that hung out in the belt and eventually migrated, or it could be a fragment from a larger one. We really don’t know,” Cooke said.
Other meteors have been seen in Ohio’s skies in recent weeks. In mid-February, one was spotted on a doorbell camera around 11:30 p.m., according to CBS affiliate WNBS. Another fireball was caught on camera on March 15, local media reported.
