A meteor was apparently captured on film streaking across the skies of New Jersey and Connecticut on Tuesday morning.
NASA Meteor Watch posted that a “[d]aylight fireball” was sighted “over New York City” and that “[l]ocal media are reporting the sighting of a fireball and booms and shakings between 10 AM and noon Eastern Daylight Time today.” (RELATED: Incredible Videos Show Blue Meteor Lighting Up Sky Over Portugal)
Video of the meteor being spotted in Connecticut and New Jersey was uploaded to YouTube.
The footage captured a bright fireball streaking across the morning sky.
“It just caught my eye as a fireball streaming through the sky,” Judah Bergman, a New Jersey local, said, NBC 4 reported.
“We now have the meteor originating over New York City and moving west into New Jersey. Speed has bumped up a bit to 38,000 miles per hour,” NASA Meteor Watch wrote in a Facebook post.
NASA noted in their post that they do not and are not able to keep track of “small rocks like the one producing this fireball,” which they estimated was “only about a foot in diameter” and “incapable of surviving all the way to the ground.” NASA added that they are more concerned about “asteroids that are capable of posing a danger to us Earth dwellers” and track those dangerous space objects. NASA used “eyewitness reports” to calculate the meteor’s trajectory.
NASA previously estimated online that “the meteor descended at a steep angle of just 18 degrees from vertical, passing over the Statue of Liberty.” The agency added that it disintegrated over Manhattan, but has since wrote that it streaked over New Jersey.
“You have to have one bright enough and it has to be right over New York to get all that attention. Daytime fireballs are fairly rare and New Yorkers got to see one this morning,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office stated, NBC 4 reported.
NASA added online that the sounds and shaking “reported to the media” may have been induced by “military activity in the vicinity around the time of the fireball.”
The agency attributed the “eyewitness accounts” to the American Meteor Society.
