Presumed meteor puts on pre-dawn show
When the bright green streak of light shot across the pre-dawn sky above South Florida, Steve Reznick didn’t know what to think.
“It happened in an instant,” said Reznick, a Boca Raton physician who was out walking his dogs around 6:30 a.m. Tuesday. “It wasn’t the least bit frightening, but itwas spectacular.”
Reznick, like many others in South Florida and across the state, witnessed the fireball — believed to have been a meteor — as it appeared to hurtle across the sky toward the ocean.
Barry Baxter, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Miami, said the flash of light was “likely” a meteor.
According to the website for the American Meteor Society, a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to the research of meteors, 62people between Marathon in the Florida Keys and Jacksonville reported seeing it.
A woman in Parkland
posted to the site that the streak of light looked like it was just five feet above her roof. Another woman in Oakland Park wrote that shewas “in awe” of how fast it traveled.
Mike Hankey, operations manager with the society, said that the number of people who reported sightings of the object is likely a small fraction— less than one percent, he said— of the actual number of people who saw it.
On its website, NASA defines a meteor as “a streak of light that suddenly appears in the sky when a particle froma comet or asteroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere.”
About 48.5 tons of meteoric material lands on the Earth everyday, according to NASA.
Hankey said that what makes Tuesday morning’s event stand out is that it happened over a populated area, a relatively rare occurrence.
“One or more fireballs will hit the Earth everyday somewhere, but it’s not as common in populated areas where people can see them,” Hankey said.
One of the most significant meteor incidents in recent memory happened in 2013, when about1,000 people were hurt when a meteor pierced Russian skies, according to news reports.
Based on the combined witness reports, Hankey said the object likely passed over an area somewhere near Fort Lauderdale, but said those estimates can be many miles off.
“It becomes an optical illusion,” Hankey said. “For a guy in Orlando, he’ll see it go behind his trees and think it’s in his neighbor’s yard and in reality, it’s 300 miles away.”
Reznick said he wanted to take a picture of what he saw, but couldn’t. “I had a dog in each hand so I didn’t have time to reach for my phone,” he said.
He said the streak of light was heading east toward the ocean and moving far more quickly than an aircraft.
“Itwas not really high up in the sky,” Reznick said. “I was hoping it would make the ocean and not hit any of the buildings on A1A. I’m glad it didn’t.”
Hankey said he hadn’t yet seen any photos or videos of the Tuesday morning fireball. He’s asking people to check their home and business surveillance cameras to see if they captured the object.
“It would probably be a really cool if someone captured it,” Hankey said.