GOING OUT WITH A BANG
Meteor blazes through sky over Michigan as Richter scale-registering fireball
Thousands of people across Ohio, Michigan, and surrounding states asked the same question Tuesday night: What the heck was that?
The answer: A largerthan-usual meteor plummeting from the sky just after 8 p.m. The American Meteor Society received 355 reports of a fireball in southeast Michigan, which was spotted as far away as Wisconsin and Ontario — and even Pittsburgh.
The meteor ripped through the atmosphere at 28,000 mph, creating a sonic boom that registered a 2.0 on the Richter scale. Its remnant meteorites potentially landed between Detroit and Lansing.
The brilliant flash of light was captured on cameras attached to homes and cars. Footage and pictures were then posted on social media.
Chelsea Means captured the moment on her security cameras. Although she didn’t see the light, she said she heard a “loud thunder, rumble noise.”
“It shook my house,” she said. “At first, it sounded like someone hitting my house.”
Danny McEwen Jr. told the Detroit News that “I went to turn and I noticed a ball of flame coming at an angle.” He said he was driving when “it just blew up into a bunch of sparks. I didn’t even know what to think. It was kind of odd how orange the sky was behind me and this blaze of flame out of nowhere.”
Alex Mak, associate director at the University of Toledo’s Ritter Planetarium and Brooks Observatory, said a few people called the office to inquire about what they witnessed.
“Basically it’s a collision,” Mr. Mak said. “You have the Earth revolving around the Sun, and you have this debris also in motion. The two paths collide, and just like a car accident, you have two objects trying to occupy the same space and the meteor will fall to the Earth.”
The AMS receives reports of hundreds of fireballs every year, but Tuesday’s event was a bigger deal than most. Meteorites ranging in size from a grain of salt to a balled fist rain down on Earth every day. The object caught on video Tuesday was estimated to be two meters in diameter — or about the size of a large refrigerator — before it burned up.
Kelly Beatty, senior editor at Sky and Telescope magazine, said meteors and meteorites are a bit like seashells. Sizes vary depending on several factors.
“This goes above the level of what we would call just a bright fireball for a couple reasons,” Mr. Beatty said. “One is that [hundreds] of people reported there was an explosion and a big flash in the sky, and there was a boom. So rather than just screaming into the atmosphere and gradually melting away to nothing, the pressure and friction this object experienced became stronger than the object itself, and caused it to fragment. That’s much rarer.”
Almost 50 tons of space material pelts our planet each day, but little of it makes it through the atmosphere, according to NASA.