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Brilliant Fireball Lights Up the Sky Over Washington

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A space rock slammed into Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Northwest on Wednesday night (March 7), putting on a brief but brilliant sky show, according to media reports.

And there were a lot of those pieces raining down.

"It's really dramatic in the radar imagery, to the point that this is probably the biggest meteorite fall I've seen in the continental U.S. in the past 20 years," Fries, who's based at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Q13 Fox.

Hundreds of people reported seeing the fireball Wednesday night, Q13 Fox said. And scientists picked up readings of the event, using seismographs and satellites, from as far away as the Canadian province of Manitoba.

Technically, any meteor that blazes more brightly than Venus in the sky is a fireball. Wednesday's meteor was an uber-fireball, a superluminous type known as a bolide, Fries said.

Meteor showers can be awesome night sky sights, but how well do you know your shooting star facts? Find out here and good luck!

Meteor Shower Mania: How Well Do You Know 'Shooting Stars'?

Space rocks are responsible for most of the fireballs we see, but not all of them; sometimes the burning-up object was made by human hands. The dazzling meteor that lit up skies over the Western U.S. in July 2016, for instance, was caused by a 6-ton piece of a Chinese rocket that fell back to Earth.

And another big piece of Chinese hardware could put on a sky show soon. The 8.5-ton Tiangong-1 space lab — which China used to help practice the docking and rendezvous maneuvers needed to build an orbiting space station — is scheduled to make an uncontrolled re-entry between March 24 and April 19, according to the latest estimates.

Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo or video of a meteor or any other celestial sight and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to: spacephotos@space.com. 

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Mike Wall
Mike Wall
Space.com Senior Writer
Michael was a science writer for the Idaho National Laboratory and has been an intern at Wired.com, The Salinas Californian newspaper, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has also worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.