Well, that was too close for comfort.
A fireball that shot through the sky on Monday was so close to Earth that the American Meteor Society received 259 reports and nine videos of its celestial sprint. In Grand Bahama, residents not only saw but heard a sonic boom, the Guardian reported.
CBS12 reporter Jay O’Brien was recording a live Facebook story for the local news outlet when he saw it racing through the sky and seemingly disappearing in a blue glow.
“WOAH! Big flash and line through the sky in West Palm Beach. Happened awhile ago when we were on Facebook Live,” he tweeted“Working to find out what it was.”
NASA astronomer Bill Cooke told the Palm Beach Post that it was a nearly 900-pound asteroid fragment that entered Earth’s atmosphere at 38,000 mph and disintegrated 23 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. During the breakup, Cooke said, the meteor generated the energy equivalent of 14 tons of TNT.
“These things just come up randomly,” Cooke added. “The atmosphere will break anything smaller than a football field.”
Meteor experts refer to Monday’s fireball – which was documented by countless dash cams and doorbell cameras – as a ‘bolide’, referring to the fact that it explodes upon entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Gianluca Masi, of VirtualTelescope.eu, told the publication that it has passed 12,430 miles from Earth’s surface, which is considered “exceptionally close”.
“This is a special kind of fireball that ends with a big flash of light and often a booming sound,” Mike Hankey, operations manager for the American Meteor Society, told the Palm Beach Post.
This particular one was actually quite small – about two feet in diameter – meaning it doesn’t technically qualify as an asteroid, but rather just an asteroid fragment or meteoroid.