Fireballs Lit Up US Skies This Weekend and Rocked Texas With a Sonic Boom
The next few weeks could be the best time of year to see space pebbles and bigger boulders sizzling in the sky.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
A fireball captured over the UK in 2021 by a network of all-sky cameras.
A pair of brilliant fireballs lit up skies over the central United States this past weekend, including one caused by a bolide big enough to trigger a sonic boom over parts of Texas on Sunday night.
Fireballs, or unusually bright meteors, are actually small space rocks slamming into our atmosphere at dizzyingly high speeds and burning up in dramatic fashion from the resulting friction.
The American Meteor Society received over 150 reports of one such meteor seen by night owls up at 1:52 a.m. ET Friday. Most of the sightings were reported or recorded from Indiana, but the sizzling space detritus was seen from as far off as northern Alabama and Wisconsin.
Just two nights later, at 10:52 p.m. CT Sunday, over 200 eyewitnesses 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.
Computer models of the fireball's trajectory indicate that it entered our atmosphere above rural Texas to the southeast of Austin. It then zipped over the metro area and burned out just a few miles to the west of Austin.
While most meteors that create fleeting shooting stars as they burn up are the size of pebbles before they strike our atmosphere, Lunsford estimates 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.
Most meteors completely burn up in the upper atmosphere, but as this larger object careened toward Earth's surface, all the heat from its collision with our atmosphere likely burned away all but the smallest fragments.
The fireball was widely reported by local media in Texas, but so far there have been no reports of anyone discovering any resulting meteorites on the ground.
Fireballs are actually reported every day all over the planet, despite the fact that many happen over the ocean or another remote area and most people will be lucky to catch one or two during a lifetime.
But the next few weeks are prime fireball spying season thanks to the peak of some major meteor showers including the Perseids and a few others. Always good to keep one eye on the sky.