The flash of the fireball over Michigan skies Tuesday night could be seen as far away as New York City. It shook houses and caused a 2.0 magnitude earthquake.
It was “definitely a meteoroid,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s meteoroid environment office in Alabama, told The Detroit News.
And it might have left pieces of itself behind on the ground.
Social media exploded with reports of a bright light flashing in the sky just northwest of Detroit and homes in the area shaking shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Was it lightning, people wondered? An explosion? Some thought they’d seen a UFO.
“I have to say when I first saw that, the thought crossed my mind that this was going to be the beginning of the end. It was that surreal,” the police chief of Wolverine Lake, Mich., John Ellsworth, told CBS Detroit.
He said the impact felt like an electric jolt.
Reports of the flash, a “sonic boom” and dogs freaking out rolled in from Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and parts of Canada, the Detroit Free Press reported.
“All of the sudden, the whole yard started getting brighter, kind of yellowish-orange, like a flashbulb, then got black ... ,” Mike Tarkowski of Mildford, Mich., who was watching TV at home when the meteor hit, told the News.
“It was something big, and it was something up in the air.”
The fireball was so bright that it could be seen through the clouds on NASA’s meteor camera at Oberlin College in Ohio, about 120 miles away, according to a post on the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page where NASA researchers and the public share information.
The camera showed a tiny white ball crossing the screen until a bright flash appeared when it made impact, according to the News.
Photos and videos — some from home surveillance videos that captured the explosion of light — from witnesses quickly popped up on Twitter, where #meteor became a top-five trending topic, according to ABC News.
One Twitter user posted a 10-second dashcam video showing the celestial wonder.
The earthquake it caused was centered about 40 miles northeast of Detroit, according to the United States Geological Survey.
Cooke estimated the meteoroid was about 1 to 2 yards across and weighed more than a metric ton.
“Little chunks of rock and debris in space are called meteoroids. They become meteors — or shooting stars — when they fall through a planet’s atmosphere; leaving a bright trail as they are heated to incandescence by the friction of the atmosphere,” says NASA’s solar system website page. “Pieces that survive the journey and hit the ground are called meteorites.”
A Wednesday post on the NASA Meteor Watch page said it was a very slow moving meteor, “speed of about 28,000 miles per hour.”
“This fact, combined with the brightness of the meteor (which suggests a fairly big space rock at least a yard across), shows that the object penetrated deep into the atmosphere before it broke apart (which produced the sounds heard by many observers),” the post said.
“It is likely that there are meteorites on the ground near this region — one of our colleagues has found a Doppler weather radar signature characteristic of meteoric material falling to earth.”
Pieces of meteorites can sell for $300 per gram or more, the Free Press reported, based on an eBay post from a metal detector company.
This story was originally published January 17, 2018 10:11 AM.