Blazing fireballs cross the sky, exploding over the United States and Canada

Monolith, schmonolith. As the internet is busy contemplating the nature of the shiny metallic markers popping up around the world, balls of fire are raining down on us. There is a REM song for that, I know that …

Images released by live webcam service EarthCam on Wednesday show a small object passing in front of Toronto’s CN Tower and the sky lit up for a brief moment. CityNews reports that viewers emailed the network saying they saw a fireball in the sky, and the American Meteor Society, which tracks these events, recorded nearly 100 sightings around noon on Wednesday.

Although the image above appears to show the object passing by the CN Tower and looking more like a bird than a space rock, later images of the light bursting day sky indicate a meteor crashing down and burns in the earth’s atmosphere. Check it out below:

A meteor is a piece of metallic rock that crashes into Earth’s atmosphere and burns. If the pieces of rock don’t just disintegrate on impact and reach the surface, they are known as meteorites. These rocks are important to astronomers because they reveal secrets about our early solar system and the types of chemicals and elements we might find in space.

Only a week ago research vessel in the Southern Ocean captured footage of a huge ball of fire blazing in the sky before disappearing. Are there more and more of these events? It isn’t – meteors collide with Earth’s atmosphere all the time, but we are just looking at the world from more angles than ever before.

On Sunday, another type of object will light up the Australian sky when The Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft returns a sample of a virgin asteroid to Earth.