Fireball as bright as a full moon blazes across the night sky in Georgia, NASA says
A fireball that blazed above southeast Georgia was as bright as a full moon, officials said.
The streak was spotted lighting up the night sky at about 10 p.m. Sunday, according to the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page.
At least 88 people reported seeing the fireball in Georgia and neighboring states, including Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, the American Meteor Society said. The phenomenon also was seen from space and caught on NASA cameras.
“An analysis of the video data shows that the fireball first appeared 52 miles above the town of Donald in southeast Georgia, moving northwest at 45,000 miles per hour,” NASA wrote in its Facebook post.
Donald is in Long County, roughly 60 miles southwest of Savannah. After traveling from there, officials said the meteor “burned up about 23 miles above Sanders Road” in nearby Toombs County.
That means the fireball traveled about 30 miles to the northwest from where it started.
“At its peak, the meteor’s brightness rivaled that of the full moon, which indicates it was caused by an asteroid fragment about 8 inches in diameter with a weight of 20 pounds,” officials said.
Fireballs are meteors that are visible “over a very wide area,” according to experts. Meteors are sometimes called shooting stars and show the path taken as asteroids or pieces of comets quickly come into our planet’s atmosphere.
“Objects causing fireballs are usually not large enough to survive passage through the Earth’s atmosphere intact, although fragments, or meteorites, are sometimes recovered on the ground,” NASA said on its website.
This story was originally published October 11, 2021 at 1:34 PM with the headline "Fireball as bright as a full moon blazes across the night sky in Georgia, NASA says."
