NASA has stepped in to explain after reports of a “daylight fireball” flying over the Statue of Liberty in New York, USA.
On Tuesday, residents of New York reported a large fireball and an associated loud boom between 11:16 and 11:30 am.
“As I was driving down on Rte 100, I suddenly saw this bright, white and kind of burning at one end, bundle streak through the sky from left to right – going down very rapidly,” one report to the American Meteor Society reads. “I have never seen anything like this before.”
Multiple reports came in to the American Meteor Society, and using these accounts, NASA was able to put together a rough picture of the object’s trajectory, which changed as more reports came in.
“More eyewitness reports have been posted – we have double what we had before and the adds have made a big difference in the trajectory,” NASA’s Meteor Watch explained in a Facebook post. “We now have the meteor originating over New York City and moving west into New Jersey. Speed has bumped up a bit to 38,000 miles [61,155 kilometers] per hour.”
NASA’s assessment of the bolide’s trajectory.
Image credit: NASA Meteor Watch
Commenters seemed surprised that a meteor could have hit without NASA knowing about it, but smaller objects like this hit the Earth’s atmosphere fairly frequently, with estimates suggesting that around 44,000 kilograms (97,000 pounds) of meteoric material fall on the Earth every day.
“Many folks are under the impression that NASA tracks everything in space,” NASA’s Meteor Watch continued. “We do keep track of asteroids that are capable of posing a danger to us Earth dwellers, but small rocks like the one producing this fireball are only about a foot [0.3 meters] in diameter, incapable of surviving all the way to the ground. We do not (actually cannot) track things this small at significant distances from the Earth, so the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or a fireball.”
While NASA keeps track of the big objects that make close approaches, several smaller meteors can be seen an hour on any given night. This one was likely a bolide; a larger meteor that broke apart as it came in contact with the friction of our atmosphere. Bolides are very bright meteors that can be seen during daylight, and are usually too small to reach the ground, instead exploding upon impact with our atmosphere.
Though we didn’t see it coming, it’s nothing to worry about, and it’s pretty cool that we can piece together its trajectory from eyewitness accounts.
