CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) — A 7-ton meteor that sped across the Cleveland sky at 45,000 miles (72,420 kilometers) per hour on Tuesday before breaking apart in a thunderous boom startled residents who feared an explosion.
People several states 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. NASA later confirmed that it was a meteor nearly 6 feet (1.83 meters) in diameter.
“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.
The meteor was first seen about 50 miles above Lake Erie, near Lorain. It traveled more than 34 miles (55 kilometers) through the upper atmosphere before fragmenting over Valley City, north of Medina, NASA said in a statement from Bill Cooke, who leads the agency’s Meteoroid Environments Office in Huntsville, Alabama.
It unleashed an energy of 250 tons of TNT when it broke apart, causing the boom. Staff at the National Weather Service in Cleveland also heard it and felt the vibrations. 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.