Fireball sightings were reported in multiple states across the southeastern United States during the day on Thursday, which NASA determined was produced by an asteroidal fragment weighing over a ton and moving over 30,000 mph.
“The meteor was first seen at an altitude of 48 miles above the town of Oxford, Georgia, moving southwest at 30,000 miles per hour,” Bill Cooke, lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, said in a statement on Friday.
“The resulting pressure wave propagated to the ground, creating booms heard by many in that area,” he said, adding that multiple Doppler weather radars also detected “the signatures of meteorites falling to the ground.”
In northern Georgia, there were “numerous reports” of an earthquake .
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told ABC News it found multiple bright flashes of light during the day on Thursday via its lightning flash tracker.
One of the flashes was captured between 12:21 p.m. and 12:26 p.m. ET, south of Atlanta. Multiple videos from home security and dashcam footage in South Carolina, verified by ABC News, captured a fireball streaking across the sky around that time.
The NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service shared a “quick flash” captured around the Virginia-North Carolina border on Thursday.
NOAA’s lightning mapper can sometimes detect bright meteors — or bolides — when they pass through the atmosphere, the office said.
Following “many reports” of a fireball across the Southeast, the National Weather Service in Charleston, South Carolina, also said “satellite-based lightning detection shows a streak within cloud free sky” near the Virginia-North Carolina border Thursday.
Content adapted by the team from the original source: https://abc7.com/post/fireball-sightings-reported-southeastern-us/16855939/
Leave a comment