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A rare daylight fireball and a loud boom near the Statue of Liberty in New York City suggest a meteor flew through Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday, according to NASA.
NBC 4 New York reports numerous people on social media in New York and New Jersey reported hearing a loud noise and seeing a fireball in the sky around 11:17 a.m. on Tuesday. Some people also reported feeling a shaking like an earthquake.
According to NASA Meteor Watch, “More eyewitness reports have been posted – we have double what we had before and the adds have made a big difference in the trajectory. We now have the meteor originating over New York City and moving west into New Jersey. Speed has bumped up a bit to 38,000 miles per hour.”
“Also, many folks are under the impression that NASA tracks everything in space,” NASA continued. “We do keep track of asteroids that are capable of posing a danger to us Earth dwellers, but small rocks like the one producing this fireball are only about a foot in diameter, incapable of surviving all the way to the ground. We do not (actually cannot) track things this small at significant distances from the Earth, so the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or a fireball.
“Also, NASA watches the natural stuff; the Department of Defense keeps track of satellites and orbital debris.
“We thank the American Meteor Society for providing the eyewitness accounts.”
One such eyewitness account from Northford, Connecticut was shared by the American Meteor Society in a very short video on YouTube.
ABC 7 News reported, “New York City Emergency Management Department received an update from NASA, who estimated that a meteor entered the atmosphere and disintegrated above the New York City metropolitan area.”
“Based on this data, we estimate that the fireball was first sighted at an altitude of 49 miles above Upper Bay (east of Greenville Yard). Moving a bit east of north at 34,000 miles per hour, the meteor descended at a steep angle of 18 degrees from vertical, passing over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrating 29 miles above midtown Manhattan,” said Bill Cooke, lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office.
Cooke added that the loud boom could have been caused by the meteor, but it also could have been caused by military activities that were taking place in New Jersey.
“So, if the fireball produced a boom it’s kind of lost in all the stuff generated by military activity to your south,” he said.