A meteor tearing through the atmosphere was visible to residents across British Columbia Tuesday night, producing a blinding flash and a loud sonic boom felt and heard across a wide stretch of the Pacific Northwest. According to CBC, experts confirmed the event was a naturally occurring fireball caused by a rocky asteroid fragment entering the upper atmosphere at extreme speed.
NASA stated the object became visible roughly 98 kilometers above Coquitlam, B.C., shortly after 9pm PT, moving at around 33 kilometers per second before burning up at about 65 kilometers above Greenmantle Mountain in Garibaldi Provincial Park.
Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society confirmed the event was unquestionably a fireball. He explained that while most meteors are tiny, even a softball-sized rock moving at extreme velocity can generate a flash rivaling the brightness of a full moon. He also confirmed the object was naturally occurring rather than man-made debris.
University of British Columbia astronomy professor Brett Gladman said the fireball was witnessed from as far away as Comox to the west, Merritt to the east, and Seattle to the south. He estimated the fragment was a rocky piece of asteroid ranging anywhere from 10 to 100 centimetres across, and noted that any surviving pieces likely came down in dense, heavily forested terrain north of Coquitlam.
CBC meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe pointed to a spike on local seismographs around 9:10pm as textbook evidence of a meteor passing through the upper atmosphere, adding that objects traveling at such extreme speeds compress and superheat the surrounding air, generating the boom that startled so many residents.
