A particularly bright fireball recently lit up Appalachia as it streaked across the night sky before vanishing over North Carolina, according to NASA.
The “very bright fireball” was first spotted 45 miles above Piney Flats, Tennessee, at about 1:15 a.m. Friday, Aug. 30, the space agency said in a Facebook post. It was moving eastward at 31,300 mph, NASA said.
“The fireball was also detected by several cameras in the region, as well as the Geostationary Lightning Mapper aboard the GOES-16 spacecraft,” NASA said.
Plenty of people on the ground also saw the object burning brilliantly overhead, according to reports submitted to the American Meteor Society. The AMS received 175 witness reports from 10 states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia — though the majority of sightings were clustered within the Appalachian states.
“We had just gotten home and before I even stepped out of the vehicle I saw blue and our skin started to glow,” a Tennessee resident said. “It quickly turned to green and was right with the tree line on our property and then it passed where we were standing in observation and I saw the most beautiful orange sparkling tail.”
Videos shared with AMS show just how bright it was for homes in the fireball’s path.
Another witness in Tennessee said they were sleeping when the sudden light from outside woke them up.
A West Virginia resident was awe-struck by what they saw.
“It was just there, a brilliant green with a well defined white tail. Like a celestial emerald,” the said. “I froze and waited for it to explode like a huge firework but it just continued through the horizon. Incredibly bright and well defined. Completely surreal.”
The object was an asteroid fragment, according to NASA, small but extremely dense, estimated to be just 2 feet in diameter but weighing 1,000 pounds.
It traveled a distance of roughly 60 miles, crossed from Tennessee into North Carolina and disintegrated above the town of Altapass.
“The breakup produced an energy of 10 tons of TNT, which generated a pressure wave that propagated to the ground, causing the booms heard by many of the eyewitnesses,” NASA said.
Nearly 50 people reported hearing a sound like an explosion after the fireball passed by — the sound made as it violently broke apart.
It was “loud enough (that) dogs got scared,” a witness reported. Another said the pressure wave produced a sound and sensation that reminded them of an earthquake.
“It is likely there are meteorites on the ground in the Spruce Pine, Ingalls, Altapass area,” NASA said.
Altapass is about 110 miles northwest from Charlotte.
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