Some people in Western New York and Southern Ontario witnessed a fireball in the sky early Wednesday morning, and a few among them reported hearing a bang.
Local astronomers suspect it was a meteor which exploded after falling through the atmosphere.
“What we saw is a meteor, which is essentially a space rock which has entered earth’s atmosphere, and it’s burning up and disintegrating as it gets through,” said Tim Collins, research associate in astronomy for the Buffalo Museum of Science. “Others had heard it, and the sound comes because that meteor is now coming back across the sound barrier. It travels faster than the speed of sound, so what you heard was a sonic boom.”
Collins further explained that the object falling over the region around 5:11 a.m. was a bolide, a special kind of meteor which explodes after entering Earth’s atmosphere. They’re not very common, he noted, but meteors generally are.
“We get a few of them. It just depends on what's out there. This one will probably not be much larger than a basketball. When all was said and done, it was probably very small. If anything, it'd be a small appliance, but we'll see. We'll wait and see when we get the data,” he said.
As for the safety risk, Collins says the odds of being struck by a meteor are even higher than winning a lottery. “Go buy a lottery ticket and hope you win, and don't worry about the meteor,” he said.