A bright fireball streaked across the Philadelphia region on Tuesday afternoon, drawing more than 200 reports from five states before it burned up over southern New Jersey, NASA said.
The object was seen at around 2:30 p.m. and first became visible 48 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York, NASA said. It then moved at 30,000 miles per hour across 117 miles of the upper atmosphere before disintegrating 27 miles above Galloway, just north of Atlantic City.
Videos sent to CBS News Philadelphia from South Jersey showed the flash from places including Manchester Township and Medford, adding to reports from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. NASA said the object was likely a meteor, meaning light emitted from a meteoroid or asteroid as it enters Earth’s atmosphere and begins to burn. A fireball is a meteor brighter than Venus, while a meteorite is a fragment that survives the trip through the atmosphere and reaches the ground.
The sighting matters because NASA’s account rules out a grounded impact and places the object’s breakup high overhead, over water and then open sky rather than in a populated area. What remains is a sharp but short-lived spectacle that lit up the region, then vanished before reaching the ground.
