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Have you seen it? A fireball illuminated the east coast around 22:57. Tuesday night, emitting a bright green flash as he crossed the sky.
A fireball is a meteor bigger than normal and brighter than the planet Venus in the night sky.
Tuesday night's meteor was so bright that meteorological satellites detected it when it burned in the Earth's atmosphere.
The American Meteor Society has received more than 400 reports on the meteor, which has been observed on a wide band ranging from Roanoke to Boston. An observer in Washington, DC described as "so fast, so beautiful."
Another lucky spectator watched him from the tide pool, writing that he "moved a little slowly and barely passed the tree line when he seemed to grow and grow." a series of flashes and fragments. "
Vincent Meller, of Croyden, Pennsylvania, was camping in the Patapsco Valley State Park, west of Baltimore. He was enjoying a campfire and noticed the meteor as soon as it appeared. "The front of it was red and white while the tail looked like a blue butane torch," he wrote. "The tail of the meteor was really long. I would say it was visible for about 8 to 10 seconds.
"In fact, I thought of taking my phone and recording it on video, but I was speechless when I saw it."
Thermal map and location of the witness (box) showing the concentration of the location where a meteor was observed in the center of the Atlantic coast and the northeast on April 16. (American Meteor Society)
The fireball was visible for an unusually long time – 7 to 9 seconds, offering plenty of time to browse its hues from another world. The American Meteor Society has assembled all the reports received to calculate a preliminary three-dimensional trajectory for the meteor. They estimate that he has borrowed a north-south course just off the east end of Delaware Bay "and ended his flight in the Atlantic Ocean in front of Bethany Beach, in Delaware ".
The meteor was also detected by GOES-16, a weather satellite that, among other things, maps lightning. He traced a sudden surge of lightning 15 miles east of southern New Jersey last night over the waters, but there was no storm around. It was a false signal triggered by the infrared light of the meteor.
The GOES16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument detected a meteor over the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday night. (CIRA / NOAA adapted by the author)
When a meteor enters the earth's atmosphere, it encounters extreme friction. Just like the heat created when you rub your palms against each other, the space rock begins to heat up when it rubs against the air molecules at supersonic speeds. When the objects reach sufficiently high temperatures, they emit photons. It makes a meteor glow.
All this heat gnaws the meteor, vaporizing it into a trail of bright dust that can remain for a few seconds. From time to time, the stress it experiences in the middle or lower atmosphere can cause the meteor to break into pieces of stone that are raining. But meteor hunters must not hope. According to the American Meteor Society, "If anything has survived, it's in the water."
Fireball meteors are not terribly rare; a shine like this can be seen from most places on Earth once every two months. But that does not mean that finding them is easy. It's a game of patience and luck – because there is no way to predict when any of these events can happen. It was visible during an exceptional period during its descent over the center of the Atlantic coast.
Two fireballs in two hours flew over the Capitol on December 10th.
You will find below other eyewitness accounts of Tuesday night's show on Twitter:
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