A thunderous boom heard and felt widely across northeastern Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania on Tuesday morning was likely the result of a meteor.
Area residents took to social media, describing what they heard as “the loudest boom,” “a few sonic booms” and “rumbling.” Others reported seeing a fireball and a bright streak flash across the sky just before 9 a.m. ET.
The Pittsburgh office of the National Weather Service posted a dramatic video on X, captured by one of its employees, showing a fireball with a long tail hurtling across a cloudless sky.
The weather service in Cleveland, meanwhile, shared imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-19 satellite, saying: “The latest GLM imagery (1301Z) does suggest that the boom was a result of a meteor.”
The American Meteor Society, which tracks fireball events around the world, had 140 eyewitness reports for Tuesday’s meteor across the Midwest and Northeast. The reports came from people in 10 states — including Illinois, Kentucky and New York — as well as Washington, D.C. and the Canadian province of Ontario.
Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, said all available data suggests the meteor was first visible at an altitude of about 50 miles above Lake Erie in northern Ohio.
“Moving east of south at 45,000 miles per hour, the fireball — caused by a small asteroid nearly six feet in diameter and weighing about seven tons — traveled over 34 miles through the upper atmosphere before fragmenting 34 miles over Valley City, north of Medina,” Cooke said in a statement to NBC News.
Some fragments likely continued streaking across the skies, producing meteorites around Medina County, Ohio, he added.
Rocky objects traveling through space are known as meteoroids, but when they enter Earth’s atmosphere and create fireballs, they are called meteors. Any fragments that fall to Earth’s surface are meteorites.
Cooke said that Tuesday's meteor likely unleashed an enormous amount of energy when it fragmented, equivalent to 250 tons of TNT. That caused the sonic booms and explosive noises that startled so many people.
Large meteors that create bright fireballs are relatively rare but not altogether uncommon. Small space rocks, bits of dust and old rocket parts hit Earth on a daily basis, according to NASA, but most burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.
