Fireball Lights Up New York’s Evening Sky for Brief 5 Seconds, Amazing Over a Hundred Witnesses

Over the weekend, a fireball streaked through the sky over the northeastern United States, amazing hundreds of stargazers as the hurtling ball of flame lit the night up briefly.

Around 120 witnesses reported the occurrence to the American Meteor Society, a nonprofit organization that gathers reports of meteor sightings all over the world, Live Science reported.

One witness, Palmyra, New York-based Eric Lofrgen, fortuitously managed to record the five-second approach of the fireball with his vehicle dashcam.

Fireballs are a bright class of meteors, a falling space rock that catches fire while plunging through the atmosphere of Earth.

Meteors Falling Toward, Burning Up the Earth's Atmosphere

The AMS reported that meteors qualify as fireballs when their brightness or magnitude goes beyond minus 4, the same magnitude as Venus in the evening or morning sky.

To compare, the full moon has a magnitude of minus 12.6 while the sun has a magnitude of minus 26.7.

Fireballs are very common if easily missed. Several thousands of fireballs fall toward Earth each day, although the day's brightness merely masks a huge majority of these fall over oceans and uninhabited sites.

The majority of these meteors are completely burning in the atmosphere. Usually, a fireball needs to have a greater magnitude than minus 8 to stand a chance of smashing into Earth as a meteorite, AMS also reported.

Previous Fireball Occurrences

A brighter object usually denotes a larger object which is more possible to survive the trip across the atmosphere.

It is difficult to identify how big and bright the meteor that fell on Sunday over the northeastern US was, as the apparent magnitude of the fireball is changing based on its distance from the observer.

Witnesses approximate that the fireball has a magnitude between zero and minus 26. This means that some observers saw a ball shining nearly as brightly as the sun.

Reports of the fireball came in from dozens of cities throughout several states, including New York, Virginia, Maine, and Pennsylvania, as well as other provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada. Most witnesses approximated that the fireball stayed overhead for 1.5 to 3.5 seconds past 8:30 pm.

Captured by NASA Cameras

This is not the first time a bright fireball has been spotted in New York and Pennsylvania. In 2015, NASA reported that a bright fireball was seen over the said two states one February morning. It was captured by three cameras of the American space agency.

Earlier on, in 2003, it was specified in a separate NASA report that Fireballs were much in the news during the latter part of March because of a big one that was spotted in the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan areas.

The fireball streaked through the sky and exploded in a single bright flash. This said report said that fireballs are indeed just big meteors, the result of meteoroids that fall and burn up into the atmosphere of Earth,

The rock causing the "Chicago Fireball," as the 2003 occurrence has been called, was, perhaps, a tiny space rock approximately one or two meters wide.

Related information about a fireball spotted is shown on FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth's YouTube video below:

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