A gathering of neighbors in Cockeysville shared an unexpected light show last night with skygazers across the mid-Atlantic as a meteor breaching Earth’s atmosphere lit up their neighborhood.
Hundreds of eyewitnesses and publicly available cameras saw the event, which happened sometime around 9:23 p.m., according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Meteor Watch.
The asteroid fragment traveling 36,000 miles per hour was first visible 47 miles above Forest Hill, Maryland, according to a NASA data analysis. The space rock then raced northwest through the atmosphere before burning up 22 miles above Gnatstown, Pennsylvania.
The meteor, estimated to be 1 foot in diameter and weighing 60 pounds, hailed from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Jessica Finke, of Springdale in Cockeysville, said she saw a bright green ball of light streak horizontally across the sky. A tail of smaller light balls followed. The last one was orange, she said.
”It went by so fast,” she said. “It was like a firework but no sound.”
Then, moments later, she, her husband and their neighbors heard a loud boom.
”I’m assuming that was related to the meteor. But I’m not sure,” she said.
The 39-year-old was so stunned she couldn’t get her phone out fast enough, but said she felt lucky to have seen it.
Plenty of documented accounts soon appeared online for Finke and her neighbors to relive what they had just seen, as skywatchers lit up social media with videos of the burning atmospheric dust.
Finke had seen a shooting star before, but the remarkable colors made her wonder if this was something different. And what about the loud boom?
A meteor, often called a shooting star, is the light seen when pieces of an asteroid, or space rock, burn up as they enter Earth’s dense atmosphere. Bright meteors measuring over a certain magnitude, like last night’s, are called fireballs.
The vibrant green and orange color Finke and others witnessed came from ionization, or energy transfer, created when metals in the asteroid hit the atmosphere, according to NASA.
Meteors are always zipping through space and sometimes skimming our atmosphere without our ever knowing, said Mike Hankey, an astronomer and software developer responsible for redesigning the American Meteor Society’s fireball reporting tool.
Though bright meteors breaching Earth’s atmosphere aren’t rare, seeing them in a major metropolitan area, like Baltimore, can be, he said. What makes last night’s event special, he said, is the boom.
Friction from Earth’s dense atmosphere pushes against the fragment, causing it give off light energy, burn out and blow up, Hankey said. This is when we see it.
But last night’s boom means that the meteor remained intact as it got closer to Earth’s surface.
“That basically means it survived to the surface as a meteorite,” he said. “To put it in context, there’s only been eight meteorites recovered in Pennsylvania in the entire history of the state.” If someone recovers a piece of this one, it would be the ninth.
The American Meteor Society was founded in 1911 to organize professional and amateur astronomers interested in recording meteor events.
Hankey, who lives in Baltimore, spoke to The Banner from Dulles International Airport. He had just flown home from the 42nd International Meteor Conference in Belgium, missing a meteor that may have been within sight.
“The first thing I’m going to do is get into all my cameras. I’m going to triangulate this event,” he said, referencing his network of meteor-spotting cameras to analyze where the meteorite may have landed. “And then tomorrow morning, I’m going to go, hopefully, look for it. Maybe find it.”
The meteor was the second night sky anomaly of the evening for the Cockeysville neighbors. Just 10-15 minutes before that, the couples and their children saw a line of evenly spaced lights that looked like stars following each other across the sky. What she described may have been one of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite trains. The company launched 21 satellites into orbit last night, according to SpaceX.
