Giant Meteor Explodes Over East Coast
If you were on the East Coast and looking up at the sky on Tuesday night, you might have seen a green fireball shoot across the sky. Hundreds of people from Maine to South Carolina saw the sky light up around 11 PM thanks to an exploding meteor. According to weather satellites, the meteor exploded over New Jersey, but the fireball could even be seen as far south as Brazil.
The meteor was likely only a few inches in diameter, but it was moving so fast that it produces an immense amount of energy in the atmosphere. Some New Jersey residents reported that their houses shook from the force of the explosion.
The meteor was picked up by NOAA’s GOES weather satellite, which was launched last year to replace aging satellites in the agency’s network. According to the satellite data, the meteor entered into the atmosphere somewhere near the equator and burned up a few seconds later over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey.
Even though the fireball was only visible for a few seconds, plenty of people managed to capture videos, including this dash cam footage from Maryland.
These sorts of meteor fireballs aren’t actually all that uncommon, but they tend to be over in just a few seconds, making them hard to catch. A meteor like this one likely hits the Earth once a month or so, but usually few people spot it. This time we were lucky.
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