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An illustration of a bright fireball meteor falling through the daytime sky. One such fireball erupted over the northeastern U.S. on Saturday, shaking nearby buildings.
(Image credit: Nazarii Neshcherenskyi via Getty Images)
NASA has confirmed that a bright fireball meteor exploded in the sky over New England on Saturday (May 30), releasing the equivalent energy of about 230 tons of TNT and generating a sonic boom heard across multiple U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.
The meteor was relatively small — about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter, NASA wrote in a statement on X. However, it faced incredible friction while tumbling through the atmosphere at about 42,000 mph (67,000 kilometers per hour). The meteor broke the sound barrier as it split apart roughly 31 miles (50 km) over Earth, raining debris onto Cape Cod, according to NASA.
An NOAA satellite captured the meteor passing through the atmosphere before it broke apart.
(Image credit: NOAA)
No injuries or property damage were reported in connection to the fireball. But onlookers in several northeastern states said they heard a loud boom and felt buildings shake as the meteor exploded around 2:06 p.m. EDT, according to The Guardian.
NASA estimates that the meteor had a mass of about 5.6 metric tons before it fragmented. Meteors that small are incredibly hard to track in space, NASA noted in a separate statement on X. That said, they also are highly unlikely to survive the intense heat and pressure as they fall through the atmosphere, and they thus pose no serious risk of damage to cities.
Far more dangerous are large, near-Earth asteroids measuring more than 460 feet (140 m) in diameter. Sometimes dubbed "city-killers," these large space rocks could survive the plunge through the atmosphere and cause massive damage if they were to fall onto a populated area.
They are also much easier to track than small asteroids; NASA keeps tabs on more than 40,000 large asteroids in our planet’s vicinity at all times. Several thousand still remain to be discovered, NASA estimates suggest, but next-generation asteroid tracking probes are poised to close this gap in the next decade.
Saturday's fireball is one of many that have been spotted in recent months. On May 25, cameras recorded a dazzling green fireball plummeting through the sky behind the erupting Mount Mayon volcano in the Philippines. On March 21, a cannonball-size meteor chunk crashed through the roof of a Texas family's home, causing damage but no injuries. And just days before that, a 6-foot-wide (1.8 m) fireball erupted over Ohio, triggering a powerful sonic boom.
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Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
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