A Bright Meteor Lit Up the New England Sky Before Exploding With a Loud Boom—and Its Pieces May Have Landed in Cape Cod Bay
People reported seeing the glowing space rock or hearing or feeling its breakup from Delaware to Montreal. Experts estimate that it was about three feet wide and traveling at 75,000 miles per hour when it broke apart
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Many residents of eastern Massachusetts were startled by a thunderous boom on Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a tree falling, nor—despite the shaking—an earthquake. The resounding noise came from a bolide, an ultrabright meteor that broke apart in the atmosphere.
The explosive event occurred on May 30 at 2:06 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, as detected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-19 weather satellite and observed by eyewitnesses, according to a social media post by NASA. The meteor was about three feet wide, and people reported seeing the glowing space rock, hearing its explosion or feeling the tremors from Delaware to Montreal, Robert Lunsford, fireball report coordinator for the American Meteor Society, tells the Associated Press.
Quick fact: What are super bright meteors called?
Meteors that outshine Venus—but don’t necessarily explode—are called fireballs. Breaking up in the atmosphere bumps them up to bolide status.
“The whole house, actually all houses in the neighborhood, shook. Much louder than a transformer exploding and definitely not an earthquake,” wrote a witness in Melrose, north of Boston, as reported by WCVB 5 ABC’s Veronica Haynes and Arielle Mitropoulos. “We heard it in Newtonville”—west of Boston—“and it was enough to set off the dog and make me think a big tree had come down because of the wind,” another witness tells the outlet.
The celestial object was zooming at 75,000 miles per hour at the time of breakup, says Jennifer Dooren, NASA’s deputy news chief, in a statement to Agence France-Presse. Fragmentation occurred around 40 miles above northeast Massachusetts and southeast New Hampshire, NASA wrote on social media, and experts estimate that the energy released was comparable to around 300 tons of TNT. The space rock’s violent journey, ripping through the atmosphere, and subsequent breakup caused the dramatic boom.
“What you hear is the air compression of it moving really fast, creating those pressure waves, and occasionally, sometimes you’re also hearing the stone itself break apart from the forces that it’s going through,” Shauna Edson, an astronomy educator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, tells WBZ-TV CBS Boston’s Riley Rourke and Jacob Wycoff.
Small meteors frequently pierce Earth’s atmosphere, but they aren’t usually accompanied by such a strong sound, Ken Mahan, lead meteorologist for the Boston Globe, tells the outlet’s Truman Dickerson.
Scientists speculate that about 48.5 U.S. tons of space rock fall toward Earth every day, but most of it burns up in the atmosphere, leaving a trail of light we call “shooting stars.” About five to ten percent of those meteors partially survive the hot, intense journey to the planet. Rocks that reach the ground are called meteorites, and they’re usually between the size of a pebble and a fist.
WATCH: 3-foot wide meteor enters atmosphere near Massachusetts and New Hampshire border causing loud boom over Boston pic.twitter.com/rP1uJHIKTj
— Rapid Report (@RapidReport2025) May 31, 2026
During Saturday’s event, several weather surveillance instruments detected signs that meteorites may have fallen into Cape Cod Bay, according to a different NASA statement. When space rocks fall into water, the event is dubbed a “fishy squisher” in “uber-serious scientific terms,” the agency writes.
This isn’t the first celestial intruder to draw attention this year. In March, a seven-ton asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Ohio, a suspected meteorite tore through the roof of a home in Texas and two green meteors lit up the sky on the West Coast. Experts said these closely timed events did not appear to be related.
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