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Big Fireball USA

5 August 2023
Astronomy

At https://spaceweather.com … [see posts on August 3rd and 4th] … a bright fireball was seen over the eastern side of the US. Sonic booms rolled across and woke people up. Others were brought out of their sleep by their house shaking – and the appearance of a bright light around 2.00 am in the morning. It first appeared, in eyewitness reports, over Ohio, and petered out over Georgia. It is said to have flashed like lightning by those eyewitnesses, and it divided into 3 separate fragments after exploding.

There are currently three meteor streams that might have harboured the space rock, three showers that are active and capable of producing bright fireballs. These are the Perseids, the Alpha Capriconids, and the Southern Delta Aquarids. However, the path of the fireball does not fit any of these meteor streams. In an update, NASA say it was a comet fragment weighing just 75 lbs, with a diameter of just 12 inches. They say it entered the atmosphere above Kentucky and disintegrated over Virginia. The break up of the fireball generated an energy of roughly 2 tons of TNT. This caused the booms and shaking experience. At its brightest it was around 5 times as bright as a full moon. At the moment no one knows what comet it came from – and there are no reports  of people picking up the shattered pieces.

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