A daylight fireball meteorite may have been behind a loud boom heard by residents in New York and New Jersey on Tuesday morning, according to NASA officials.
A daylight fireball is a meteor that shines brightly enough to be visible to the naked eye during daylight hours, because it burns brighter than the sun’s light as it speeds into Earth’s atmosphere, as per the American Meteor Society.
NASA’s Meteor Watch team reported that the daylight fireball was spotted as 11:17am ET, in an update posted on Facebook Tuesday afternoon.
According to the American Meteor Society the loud bang that was heard across lower Manhattan and parts of New Jersey this morning was a sonic boom from a meteorite disintegrating in the atmosphere above the Statue of Liberty. And we thought the heat wave was bad… 🫢🗽☄️
— Plamen Novakov (@Plamen_Novakov) July 16, 2024
In its tracking of the meteor’s path, NASA suggests that the fireball flew at an altitude of 49 miles above Upper Bay near Greenville Yard in Jersey City. Authorities reported that the fireball might have passed at a rate of 34,000 miles per hour as it passed over the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York Harbor.
The speeding rock then seemed to disintegrate 29 miles above Midtown, Manhattan, according to NASA’s estimates.
Uncertainty around the New York meteorite
Officials stated that as of Tuesday “(the estimate of) this trajectory is very crude and uncertain,” saying that the estimations are based on “a few eyewitness accounts and there is no camera or satellite data currently available to refine the solution.”
According to NASA no meteorites – fragments of meteors – were created during this incident.
Further, the agency highlighted that on Tuesday morning, at the time of the fireball sighting, there were reports of “military activity in the vicinity,” stating that this “would explain the multiple shakings and sounds reported to the media.”
The loud bang and reported shaking were coming from southern New Jersey to parts of Queens and Brooklyn, according to NYC Emergency Management (NYCEM). Aried Dela Cruz, an official from NYCEM, highlighted that the agency “has received no reports of damage or injuries related to this event,” in a post on X Tuesday.
It is not clear how frequently something like this happens in the New York area, mostly because NASA does not track every small meteor that makes its way to our planet or enters our atmosphere.
Some New Yorkers remained unfazed by the whole thing, according to the New York Times, but others, astounded by this freak event, could not help but read this meteoric incident as a sign of dark times.
“You’d think that’s a sign,” said Charlotte Alberts, 26, as she walked her dogs in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood. “Something’s brewing,” she told the New York Times.
When the city was rattled by a minor earthquake in April, Alberts said she first mistook the shaking for a panic attack, but on Tuesday she was looking across the East River to the sky above when the meteor passed, per the New York Times. According to the paper, the 26-year-old thought the whole thing was “insane.”
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