by At 3:00 am (EST) on November 19, a bright green fireball streaked across the sky over the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Witnesses reported seeing a helicopter-like object drifting silently through the air before lighting up large swaths of the night like a massive bolt of lightning. After about 10 seconds, it was gone.
This fireball was a small meteoritedetected by astronomers only three hours before it fell LandThe atmosphere of , caught fire and broke into hundreds of pieces. Most of those pieces probably crashed directly into Lake Ontario, although some small pieces may have impacted land on the southern shore of the lake. according to nasa.
Seven observatories around the world watched the meteor plunge in the early morning, and at least 59 people in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and nearby Ontario, Canada, reported seeing the fireball in the International Meteor OrganizationThe Meteor Observation Database.
A witness – Dereck Bowen from Brantford, Ontario (a city located about 60 miles, or 97 kilometers, west of the New York border), managed to capture the fireball’s descent with a GoPro camera set to automatically record the sky at night. A spectacular 30-second sky exposure shows the moment the meteor rose overhead, with the glowing green trail of rock falling toward Earth and lighting up the clouds around it.
Another camera installed outside the nearby CN Tower, an 1,815-foot (553-meter)-tall communications tower in Toronto, also captured the meteor’s brilliant streak across the sky.
Well, here’s a BEAUTIFUL view of the car from the camera facing the Tower… pic.twitter.com/cxl1lrVeM8November 19, 2022
Fireballs are exceptionally bright meteors that usually originate from asteroids or parts of comets orbiting the sun, according to POT.
The November 19 fireball, now officially named 2022 WJ1, was likely a small asteroid measuring no more than 3.2 feet (1 m) in diameter. When space rocks like these enter Earth’s atmosphere, they heat up and slow down due to intense friction, producing a visible trail of fiery light behind them. Depending on the composition of a meteor, can also glow green as he falls to his doom.
Fireballs are generally considered harmless, since most of their pieces burn up in the atmosphere before impacting Earth. However, there may be some rare exceptions. On November 5, a man in California claimed that a fireball set fire to his house after it appeared in the sky moments before. Experts from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection are still investigating the cause of the fire.
