Meteor explodes off coast of Massachusetts, causing loud boom - CBS News

A meteor exploded off the coast of Massachusetts, causing a loud boom that could be heard throughout the state Saturday afternoon, according to WBZ-TV chief meteorologist Eric Fisher. NASA said the energy released when the meteor broke up was equivalent to about 230 tons of TNT.

It was heard around 2:11 p.m. Eastern Time, with people describing a sudden bang that rattled windows, startled pets, and even shook some homes. Dozens of phone calls came into the WBZ-TV newsroom reporting a loud explosion heard around Boston, as far as Ipswich and Johnston, Rhode Island.

According to preliminary reports submitted to the American Meteor Society, dozens of people across the Northeast reported seeing the fireball around 2 p.m. Saturday. Sightings stretched across multiple states, helping scientists piece together the meteor's path through the atmosphere.

View this post on Instagram

Satellite lightning data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed a signature consistent with a meteor around the same time the boom was reported. The data also showed that the meteor probably entered the atmosphere over the South Shore near Boston.

"The meteor was about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter with a mass of 5.6 metric tons and entered Earth's atmosphere at roughly 42,000 mph," NASA said in a statement. "The meteor traveled through the atmosphere from northwest to southeast for 26 miles before breaking up at an altitude of 31 miles and producing a meteorite fall into Cape Cod Bay."

Most meteors burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, but larger objects can occasionally survive long enough to create the brilliant fireballs and booming shock waves that grab people's attention.

Why would a meteor cause a sonic boom?

If you heard the boom Saturday afternoon, you may be wondering how a space rock can make that much noise.

Meteors enter Earth's atmosphere at incredible speeds, often traveling between 25,000 and 160,000 miles per hour. Most are no larger than pebbles or grains of sand and burn up harmlessly high above our heads.

Occasionally, a larger object survives long enough to plunge deeper into the atmosphere. As it tears through the air, it creates powerful shock waves, much like a supersonic jet. Those pressure waves can travel all the way to the ground as a sonic boom, sometimes heard dozens of miles from the meteor's actual path.

"What you hear is the air compression of it moving really fast, creating those pressure waves, and occasionally sometimes you're also hearing the stone itself break apart from the forces that it's going through," Shauna Edson, an astronomy educator for the Smithsonian National Space and Air Museum, told WBZ-TV.

The U.S. Geological Survey explained that "unlike earthquakes which occur at discrete location in the earth, sonic boom events occur along a linear path in the atmosphere."

Where did the meteorite land?

NASA later said, "This was a daytime bolide that produced a meteorite fall right in the middle of Cape Cod Bay." The water depth at the area of the fall site is 34 meters, according to NASA.

NASA said the fall into water is technically called a "fishy squisher."

Edson said that if it landed off the coast of Massachusetts, it would be unlikely that any pieces of it would be found. She said that the vast majority of meteorites land in the ocean because Earth is mostly water.

But eyewitness accounts and video of the fireball can help scientists determine a lot of information about the meteorite if they are unable to find pieces of it.

"How bright it was, how fast it was moving, the angle it was coming from, and how long it stayed bright for, that gives us a lot of information," Edson said. "Maybe it's part of a broken-off piece of a lone asteroid. Maybe it's just one of these smaller space things that's been floating around that we don't associate with something we know the name of."

She said that meteors are essential in determining most of the information that humans have about space.

"Meteors are the time capsules that carry information, so when we find pieces of them, each one is a treasure trove of information about the solar system," she said. "There are a few places on the moon where we have gotten moon rocks, but everything else kind of gets delivered to us by nature and we don't know where they come from."

Has anyone ever been hit by a meteorite?