Ultra-Bright Meteor Seen in Broad Daylight, Stunning Residents Across the Southeast
More than 200 sightings were sent to the American Meteor Society, and a Georgia resident reported a rock falling through a roof around the same time
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A meteor burned across the sky in broad daylight over southeastern states last week. Dashcams and security cameras captured the rare sighting streaking toward the Earth around 12:25 p.m. Eastern time on June 26.
When first spotted, the meteor was tearing through the atmosphere at almost 30,000 miles per hour. Then, it “disintegrated 27 miles above West Forest, Georgia, unleashing an energy of about 20 tons of TNT,” says Bill Cooke, lead of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, to National Geographic’s Stefanie Waldek.
Residents across Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolinas submitted more than 200 reports of a fireball to the American Meteor Society. NASA later confirmed the sightings and found that the meteor measured three feet in diameter and weighed more than one ton.
Aside from seeing the event, many also heard and felt a sonic boom around the same time, which some locals mistook for an earthquake. The so-called “daytime fireball” appears to have caused the sonic boom, and the space rock likely broke up into hundreds or thousands of pieces in the atmosphere, says Mike Hankey, an operations manager at the American Meteor Society, to Devon Sayers, Brandon Miller and Zenebou Sylla at CNN.
Did you know? The woman who was hit by a meteorite
The only person in recorded history to have been struck by a meteorite was Alabama resident Ann Hodges. On November 30, 1954, a space rock fell through the roof of her home and hit her while she was sleeping. Though she survived, she received a large bruise.
One of those pieces might have struck a home: A resident in Henry County, Georgia, reported a rock falling through their roof and ceiling, and it cracked their laminate floor upon impact, according to a Facebook post from the U.S. National Weather Service Peachtree City Georgia. The object fell “around the time of the reports of the ‘earthquake,’” per the post. “We are presuming that a piece of the object fell through their roof.”
Daytime fireballs are a rare sight to see. Usually, meteors are more visible at night—they must be exceptionally bright to be seen during the day. Since this meteor was observed in broad daylight, NASA classified it as a superbolide, or an especially luminous meteor that often explodes.
“It takes a large object (larger than a beach ball compared to your normal, pea-sized meteor) to be bright enough to be seen during the day,” Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society writes in an email to Space.com’s Anthony Wood. “We probably only average one per month worldwide, so perhaps one out of every 3,000 reports occurs during the day.”
Lunsford adds that the meteor could have been part of the daytime Beta Taurid meteor shower, an annual astronomical event that peaks at the end of June. Seeing the Beta Taurid shower, however, is difficult, because its radiant point is close to the sun, making its meteors obscured by the star’s light. So, radar techniques are typically used to detect the elusive meteors.
The Beta Taurid meteor shower event is of interest to researchers, because the Taurid swarm of debris that causes it may hide large chunks of rock that could pose a threat to Earth. In 2019, researchers scanned the Taurid swarm for objects that could approach Earth or collide with it. While those working in planetary defense must still consider the possibility that enormous meteoroids could be hidden in the debris cloud, other research has found this less likely than astronomers once thought.
Still, some experts suspect that the 1908 Tunguska Event—an explosion that occurred over a remote area of Siberia and flattened 80 million trees in a blast 1,000 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan—may have been caused by a Beta Taurid meteor. This means that the fragment from the recent fireball that made it through the Georgia home’s roof (if verified) may mark another time that the Beta Taurids left an impression on Earth, writes Space.com.
Still, more tests and time are needed before conclusions can be drawn about whether the object originated in the Beta Taurids. In this case, amateur astronomer Bob King writes for Sky & Telescope, he would “caution jumping to that conclusion too soon,” since the shower is caused by comet debris, and most meteorites are asteroid fragments.
Soon after the impact, various meteorite hunters sprang into action, searching for pieces of rock from the event, per Sky & Telescope. If you’re looking to find one, note that meteorite fragments are likely to be dark, with a black crust that resembles charcoal briquettes.
