Over 200 eyewitness reports had been submitted to the American Meteor Society website as of Friday.
“I was watching TV inside and saw the streak out of the corner of my eye,” reported a Molalla, Oregon resident. “It lasted long enough for me to turn and watch it before it exploded.”
“Never seen anything like it,” said a Seattle, Washington resident. That person also said they heard the object make a sound “like a sparkler on the 4th of July” as it raced through the sky for barely a couple of seconds. “I was looking towards the ground at my phone and was able to notice it by the sound and the brightness.”
Meanwhile, several people captured the event on video via security cameras or doorbell cameras on their property. They all show how the sky is dark and still before a bright ball of light suddenly appears. The object then flashes brightly before disappearing from view, leaving a trail behind it that lingers for a brief moment. The whole thing is over in two to three seconds.
According to many of the reports, the event took place shortly after 10:15 p.m. PT on October 12 (1:15 a.m. ET, October 13).
A fireball is the result of a space rock that enters Earth’s atmosphere at enormous speeds—tens of thousands of miles per hour—where it meets resistance from the air. This heats the object up so much that it blazes through the sky, often burning up in the process.
“Fireballs and shooting stars are pretty much the same things except fireballs are deeper into the atmosphere,” Trevor Ireland, professorial research fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia, told Newsweek. “Shooting stars are effectively the initial friction in the upper atmosphere as small objects the size of grains of sand are slowed down by the tenuous atmosphere. These are just the simple trails of light across the sky and basically stop when the grain burns up.
“Larger objects—big grains of sand to pebbles—can survive the upper atmosphere, but still burn up. As you get to bigger objects, they can penetrate deeper towards the Earth. You see them closer and can sort of see them burning up. These are the fireballs.”
Ireland added that these larger objects can sometimes push a shockwave in front of them, resulting in a sonic boom and the destruction of the object.
While fireballs and shooting stars might seem to be rare, they are actually common occurrences.
Mark Burchell, emeritus professor of space science at the University of Kent in the U.K., told Newsweek that centimeter- or pebble-sized objects enter our atmosphere from space every day, but not all of them occur at night and are therefore hidden by the sun’s glare.
“Occasionally, one of these shooting stars will be bright enough to light up the night sky, appearing as fireballs,” he said. “And these days, with the advent of lots of smart phones, people report it, and with all the observations a track can be found to show the path of the object as it enters the atmosphere.”
This track can prove useful if scientists think there is a good chance that some of the meteor might have made it to the ground intact.
“As well as being visually entertaining, if a trajectory can be found and plotted in detail, a prediction can be made as to where any surviving fragments may fall,” Burchell said. “Teams of scientists can then go out and hunt for the new meteorite, freshly landed and ready for analysis. This can produce great excitement.”
It is unclear whether or not any fragments of the October 12 fireball reached the ground.
