A bright meteor was seen briefly by hundreds of witnesses in at least 13 eastern states Friday night, many people on Twitter calling it a “fireball,” Space.com reports.
In addition to amateur reports, the WUSA news station (CBS affiliate, Washington) acquired footage of this fireball from security cameras in New York state and Maryland.
The meteor was first seen at about 8 pm Eastern Time, a small percentage of the nearly 100 tons of material from space that bombard the Earth every day. Most objects are tiny grains of dust that burn up before they reach Earth’s surface. And many larger objects are invisible to observers because they fall to Earth during daylight hours.
But some are not so small, like this one and one on Feb. 15, which exploded over Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring nearly 1,500 people. That meteor explosion, a “superbolide,” was the most powerful in more than a century, NASA scientists said.
The term “bolide” refers to a meteor that reaches an apparent magnitude of –14. Since there is no scientifically agreed-upon definition for the term, its meaning is derived from common usage. It is synonymous with “fireball” when referring to meteors that fall toward Earth.
The word is derived from Greek and means “missile.” The US Geological Survey classifies a bolus not based on its brightness in the sky, as astronomers do, but by the formation of a crater when and if it strikes the Earth.
