A suspected meteor that fell over the Cleveland area on Tuesday shook homes and startled residents who heard a boom that some compared to an explosion.
People hundreds of miles (kilometers) away reported seeing the bright fireball even though it was 9 a.m. The American Meteor Society said it received reports from Wisconsin to Maryland.
“This one really does look like it’s a fireball, which means it’s a meteorite -- a small asteroid,” said astronomer Carl Hergenrother, the group's executive director.
“So much stuff is being launched that a lot of times what you see burning up is just reentering satellites. But usually those don’t get especially bright,” he said.
He estimated that Tuesday's fireball might have been the size of a softball or basketball, or perhaps even larger, and that it would have hit the atmosphere at “many tens of miles per second.”
Staff at the National Weather Service in Cleveland also heard the boom and felt the vibrations, and suspected it was a meteor. They had no early reports of any debris being found.
“There could be some small fragments, but a lot of it would have burned up in the atmosphere,” NWS meteorologist Brian Mitchell said.
Meteors typically fall somewhere in the U.S. about once a day, while smaller pieces of space dust might fall 10 times an hour, Hergenrother said. Scientists track meteors through a network of special cameras that help capture the night sky, but more members of the public are catching them on cellphones and security cameras of their own.
“Now we’re seeing them, and there’s dozens of videos popping up all the time,” Hergenrother said.
