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Syracuse, NY – A million years or more ago, a one-ton piece of rock escaped from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, bound for Syracuse.
Rock and Earth, both pulled into orbits separated by the sun, have been slipping away for millennia.
Until just after noon on Wednesday, when this meteor crashed into Earth’s atmosphere over central New York City, clicking windows, earthquake detectors and the scattering of ancient debris as it burned in temperatures half as hot as the sun.
“He’s probably crossed Earth’s Path countless times, until his time was up in 2020,” said Robert Lunsford, fireball report coordinator for the American Meteor Society. “The risk of collision is infinitesimal, but if you do it several million times, it ultimately happens.”
Thousands of meteors hit Earth every year, but most go unnoticed because they are too small to see and because most of the planet is ocean or uninhabited land. This week has been the rarest of rare events: a meteor large and bright enough to be seen during the day, hitting the sky above a densely populated area where millions of people could experience it.
“Anyone who got to see it should remember it forever, because it’s not something most people will ever be able to see,” said Zoe Learner Ponterio, director of the Spacecraft Planetary Imaging Platform. Cornell University. “If you draw a one kilometer square in your yard, you will only get one meteor to hit that space once every 50,000 years.”
Thanks to one of the cloudiest climates in the country, most people in central New York City were unfortunately unable to witness the meteor. But it was filmed in western New York and Toronto, and people from Virginia to Ontario heard the deafening boom which some sounded like gunshots or a falling tree. As one of the 181 observers who filed reports with the Meteor Society said: “I scared the bejesus.”
Based on these reports, the company calculated that the meteor struck the atmosphere over Lake Ontario and disintegrated just south of Rochester. NASA’s estimated track shows a different track, with the meteor hitting over Syracuse and dipping southwest toward the Finger Lakes for 3 seconds before igniting. It was only 22 miles high at this point, which is a long way for a meteor to enter the atmosphere.
NASA has three meteor tracking cameras in Ohio and western Pennsylvania that would have given an accurate path, but they were turned off at the time.
“Meteor cameras only turn on at night because they are too sensitive to the sun,” said Bill Cooke, who tracks meteors for NASA.
This meteor was so bright that it was captured by a NASA satellite that monitors lightning. Pieces of debris scattered after the meteor exploded could likely be seen on the National Weather Service’s radar. And the sound boom was detected in Ontario by a seismograph, the instrument that records earthquakes.
When the meteor finally got hot enough to explode, Cooke said, it released as much energy as 66 tons of dynamite.
“When it broke, it produced a shock wave which produced the sound boom that people heard,” he said.
The meteor was just under 3 feet in diameter and weighed about 1,800 pounds, according to NASA. It’s heavy like meteors: The shooting stars seen in the annual meteor showers are no larger than small pebbles or golf balls.
Wednesday’s meteor crashed into the atmosphere at 56,000 mph.
“It’s slow for a meteor, actually,” Cooke said. “Some, like the Leonids, are traveling at 150,000 mph.”
The relatively slow speed indicates that the meteor likely broke away from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, about 92 million miles from Earth. It is as far from Earth as the sun is.
As the meteor passed through the increasingly thickening Earth’s atmosphere, it reached an estimated temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison, the surface of the sun is just under 10,000 degrees.
Cooke said the boulder – technically called a meteoroid before it struck Earth’s atmosphere and became a meteor – was the color of pencil lead. When it burst into a fireball, it emitted a light 100 times brighter than a full moon.
The meteor was large enough that some parts were able to stay intact and rain down on the earth, Lunsford said.
“It’s possible that small fragments landed somewhere between Rochester and Syracuse,” he said.
The pieces that fall to Earth, probably no bigger than charcoal briquettes, are called meteorites. They are black and look burnt, because that is exactly what they are.
“They would look pitted, similar to lava,” Lunsford said. “It’s very foreign to the normal rocks you’ll find.”
These alien meteorites can be invaluable, and a cottage industry of meteorite seekers hunts them down. Lunsford said the pieces would likely be scattered over an area about 25 miles in diameter at the end of the meteor’s path. The rough estimate from NASA shows the meteor’s path ending at the northern tip of Cayuga Lake, while the Meteor Company places the end about 60 miles to the west.
This represents several thousand square kilometers of potential debris field. Learner Ponterio, whose Cornell Museum has a collection of meteorites, said meteor hunters should not hope.
“Finding a part in the field is a pretty rare event, and almost always when someone thinks they’ve found one it turns out to be something else,” she says.
Meteors hit Earth every day and large fireballs like those on Wednesday are happening somewhere in the United States once a month, Cooke said. But this week was somewhere our somewhere.
“They’re not uncommon,” Cooke said. “But if you see it, it’s a rare event.”
READ MORE
See videos of meteors that caused a big boom in downtown New York, elsewhere
Central New Yorkers, alone together, shaken by a great boom. 80 wrote to us about it
How to watch geminid meteor shower 2020: shooting stars light up the sky in December
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