A giant fireball lit up the skies over portions of the midwest last night, with more than 200 witnesses reporting seeing the real fireworks of last night.
The National Weather Service detected the meteor around 1:29 a.m. It flew over Lake Michigan between Sheboygan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The meteor was spotted as far south as Kentucky and as far east as New York.
Due to a visible explosion, it’s likely a bolide, a larger meteor that enters with enough force to explode as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Most bolides are larger than one meter. A 20-meter bolide caused an explosion in Russia in 2013 that injured thousands and damaged more than 7,000 buildings. That event, the Chelyabinsk meteor, wasn’t even the biggest in Russia’s history. The 1908 Tunguska event levelled trees in Siberia when it exploded with the force of 10-30 megatons of TNT.
NASA-JPL keeps a running list of bolide reports here, though this latest entry has not, as of yet, been added.
Source: Washington Post
