SPARTANBURG, S.C. (WSPA) – Numerous reports of a fireball in the sky in South Carolina and Georgia Thursday afternoon had observers and scientists alike wondering what the object was.
The National Weather Service said social media posts from the area reported seeing a fireball in the sky.
7NEWS viewers from Spartanburg, Union, Greenville, and Anderson all reported seeing the meteor.
Dashcams from drivers along Interstate 85 captured video of the meteor.
Upstate law enforcement agencies also received reports of a fireball in the sky.
Initially, 911 calls reported possible plane crashes in parts of Anderson County and Greenville County before it was known what the fireball was.
A NOAA weather satellite picked up a bright flash of light around the time of the meteor just southeast of Atlanta.
(From: NOAA)Scientists say sightings like this are rare.
“If something is falling through our atmosphere pretty quickly, it could be a rock from space or it could be a chunk of satellite or space junk or something like that,” said Timothy Delisle, acting director of education at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI).
Delisle said he has reviewed video clips of the fireball but couldn’t say for sure what the object was — only that it’s not something people witness every day.
“Many meteorites as they fall, though not all, but many as they fall down, will reach a point and then kind of explode into a lot of smaller pieces,” he said. “Something quite that big and bright is fairly rare, but smaller ones literally fall all the time — every day, every hour. We just don’t notice most of them. So if they fall during the day, they would have to get very, very bright for us to see them,” Delisle added.
The American Meteor Society, a nonprofit based in New York, reported more than 160 eyewitness accounts. Reports came from as far north as Ohio and as far south as Florida.
One of those witnesses was Cherita Talanges who lives in Woodruff.
“I was just sitting there in the car wash coming off of my lunch break, and I had to look up and over there to see the fireball come down behind the trees. And I had no clue what it was,” Talanges said. “I honestly thought it was lightning at first. Like I was saying earlier, like a spaceship goes up — the fire from that — it’s like it was just coming back down instead of going up.”
In a statement Thursday night, NASA confirmed it was a meteor. According to NASA, numerous observers in the southeastern United States have filed reports of a bright daylight fireball today, Thursday, June 26, at 12:25 p.m. EDT. Our analysis of eyewitness accounts and camera, satellite, infrasound, and doppler weather radar data yielded the following information about the event:
The meteor was first seen at an altitude of 48 miles above the town of Oxford, Georgia, moving southwest at 30,000 miles per hour.
It disintegrated 27 miles above West Forest, Georgia, unleashing an energy of about 20 tons of TNT. The resulting pressure wave propagated to the ground, creating booms heard by many in that area.
The fireball was produced by an asteroidal fragment 3 feet in diameter, weighing over a ton.
The Geostationary Lightning Mappers onboard NOAA’s GOES satellites detected the fireball and provided estimates of its location and energy.
Multiple doppler weather radars detected the signatures of meteorites falling to the ground.
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