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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.
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