When a double boom rang out in New England over the weekend, shaking homes and sending pets fleeing, questions started flooding social media.
“Did anyone else hear that boom?”
“Anyone feel that?”
Photo: Stanley Fung via AP
NASA let people know over the weekend that the cause of the commotion was a meteor, but on Monday they revealed even more stunning details.
The fireball was as heavy as an elephant and 1.52m wide, and was going 67,592.5kph when it entered Earth’s atmosphere.
It broke up miles above New England on Saturday and the energy released was equivalent to about 230 tonnes of TNT, the agency estimated, accounting for the booms.
Photo: AFP / Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NASA revealed the jaw-dropping details in a social media post on Monday along with other statistics.
The meteor was made up of natural material — not a satellite or space debris — and traveled through the atmosphere for about 41.8km, NASA said, before falling into Cape Cod Bay, which sits along southeastern Massachusetts.
The agency was quick to point out that meteors are very common, but typically do not have as big an audience as this one.
“They often occur over the ocean or unpopulated areas with no witnesses, or during the daytime, making them difficult to spot,” NASA said.
The event prompted widespread speculation initially.
The rattling boom had some people in Massachusetts and Rhode Island thinking there had been an earthquake or that a tree had fallen. Others posted that their dogs were freaking out.
At least one person posed the possibility of aliens.
A man in Peabody, Massachusetts, posted that it had been a windy day, so he thought a large tree had hit his house.
When he came outside, he said, he found most of his neighbors in the street asking the same questions.
Several people filed reports with the US Geological Survey, registering the shaking they felt with the National Earthquake Information Center, agency spokesman Steve Sobie confirmed.
The agency opened an event page, based on the number of “Did you feel it?” reports it received on its Web site.
However, Sobie said there was no event registered on the agency’s seismographs, meaning the shaking was not due to an earthquake.
The American Meteor Society received dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal with people either hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake or seeing the fireball, program monitor Robert Lunsford said.
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