A large portion of Texas saw what appeared to be either an extremely bright meteor fireball or perhaps a bolide giant enough to cause a boom on Sunday night.
Social media was flooded with tales of individuals seeing the fireball from North Texas to Houston.
A Twitter netizen named Armando Pena Junior recorded a video of the incident. Meanwhile, another tipster told Fox4 that the meteoroid shook another house South of Austin.
More Than 200 People in Texas Find a Bolide Lighting Up Skies
Fireballs, also known as exceptionally bright meteors, are little space rocks that travel at extremely high speeds when colliding with our atmosphere. The accompanying friction causes the pebbles to burn up dramatically.
Night owls reported seeing one of these meteors around 1:52 a.m. ET and the American Meteor Society (AMS) received over 150 reports on Friday.
LONDON, ENGLAND - APRIL 21: A meteor crosses the sky illuminated under the stars on a clear night on April 21, 2020 in London, England. The clear skies created by the New Moon coincide with the Lyrid meteor shower, an annual display caused by the Earth passing through a cloud of debris from a comet called C/186 Thatcher.
The majority of the sightings came from Indiana. However, Wisconsin and northern Alabama also reported seeing the giant meteor.
Two nights after the incident, AMS had already received over 200 eyewitnesses who reported seeing and even hearing a larger meteor above Texas.
"Several witnesses near the flight path reported hearing a delayed sonic boom, indicating that meteorites from this fireball may have survived down to the ground," Robert Lunsford of the AMS wrote in a report.
Eyewitness recordings (as well as Nest Cam footage) of the incident have surfaced on social media, one MySanAntonio article mentioned.
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Based on the testimony of multiple witnesses who claimed to have heard a sonic boom, it is thought that some meteorites or small bits from this specific fireball had made it to the ground. Idaho Statesman, citing AMS, states that sonic booms brought on by brilliant fireballs are "quite rare."
According to scientists with the American Meteor Society, the meteor is technically categorized as a fireball because it was much brighter than one could anticipate.
The AMS predicts that the object, in this case, was "the size of a small car" before it entered the atmosphere of Earth. Because of how quickly it entered our environment, it was extremely bright.
Flying Meteor an Unusual Occurrence
A meteor in motion is a very unusual occurrence. A person is unlikely to witness more than one or two of these transient phenomena in their lifetime because they frequently occur during the day when visibility is poor or in remote locations.
Computer simulations of the fireball's trajectory show that it entered the atmosphere southeast of Austin over a rural Texas region. A few miles west of Austin, the bolide zoomed over the urban area before going out.
CNET, citing Lunsford, believes that the fireball over Austin may have initially been the size of a small car, whipping through space at more than 10 miles per second before encountering our planet. In contrast, most meteors that produce fleeting shooting stars as they burn up are the size of pebbles before they strike our atmosphere.
The heat from the impact with our atmosphere likely burned away all, but the tiniest fragments of this more giant meteor as it careened toward the surface of the Earth. Most meteors totally burn up in the high atmosphere.
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