Well, it was too close for comfort.
A fireball that scratched through the sky Monday was so close to Earth that the American Meteor Society received 259 reports and nine videos of its celestial sprint. In Grand Bahama, residents not only saw it, but heard a sound boom, The Guardian reported.
CBS12 journalist Jay O’Brien was recording a live Facebook story for the local press when he saw him running across the skies and apparently disappearing into a blue.
“WOAH! Great lightning and gusts across the sky at West Palm Beach. It happened a few moments ago while we were on Facebook Live, ”he said he tweeted. “Working to find out what it was.”
NASA astronomer Bill Cooke told the Palm Beach Post that it was a nearly 900-pound asteroid fragment that entered Earth’s atmosphere at 38,000 mph and disintegrated 23 miles above the Atlantic. In the breaking process, Cooke said, the meteor generated the energy equivalent of 14 tons of TNT.
“These things come at random,” Cooke added. “The atmosphere will break anything smaller than a football field.”
Meteorite experts are referring to Monday’s fireball, which was documented by countless control cameras and doorbell cameras – as “fireball”, which refers to the fact that it explodes at the entrance of the Earth’s atmosphere. Gianluca Masi, of VirtualTelescope.eu, told the publication that it was 12,430 miles from the earth’s surface, which is considered “exceptionally close”.
“This is a special type of fireball that ends with a big burst of light and often with a boom sound,” Mike Hankey, operations manager for the American Meteor Society, told the Palm Beach Post.
This one in particular was quite small (about 2 feet in diameter), which means that technically it does not qualify as an asteroid, but as a fragment of an asteroid or meteoroid.