Well, it was too close for comfort.
A fireball that spread across the sky on Monday was so close to Earth that the American Meteor Society received 259 reports and nine videos of its celestial sprint. In the Grand Bahama, residents not only saw it, but heard a sound boom, The Guardian reported.
CBS12 reporter Jay O’Brien was recording a live story on Facebook for the local press, when he saw her flowing through the skies and apparently disappearing into a blue fire.
“WOAH! Big flash and stripes in the sky in West Palm Beach. It happened a few moments ago while I was on Facebook Live, “he said posted on Twitter. “I’m working to figure out what it was.”
NASA astronomer Bill Cooke told the Palm Beach Post that it is a nearly 900-kilogram asteroid fragment that enters the Earth’s atmosphere at 38,000 mph and disintegrates 23 miles above the Atlantic. In the process of disintegration, Cooke said, the meteor generated the energy equivalent of 14 tons of TNT.
“These things come at random,” Cooke added. “The atmosphere will destroy something smaller than a football field.”
Meteor experts refer to Monday’s fireball – which has been documented by countless dashboards and rooms with bell – as a “fireball”, referring to the fact that it explodes at the entrance to the Earth’s atmosphere. Gianluca Masi, from VirtualTelescope.eu, told the publication that it passed 12,430 miles from the Earth’s surface, which is considered “extremely close”.
“This is a special type of fireball that ends with a big burst of light and often a blast sound,” Mike Hankey, the American Meteor Society’s operations manager, told Palm Beach Post.
This was actually quite small – about 2 meters in diameter – which means that, technically, it does not qualify as an asteroid, but rather only as a fragment of an asteroid or meteoroid.