The American Meteoroids Society reported that over 130 people witnessed a meteor coming from the sky. The said fireball was observed in the skies of Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and more.
Meteor Sighting 2022
In the Facebook post of the American Meteor Society, they mentioned that a fireball was sighted over Wisconsin, which was also seen from Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan and Nebraska. Additionally, the post continued that there have been over 100 sightings so far.
The American Meteor Society (AMS) saidthey received over 130 reports on Thursday at around 12:47 a.m. Universal Time.
To further emphasize, AMS provided a map that contains all the reports gathered. The meteor society explained that "The trajectory displayed on the map and the KML file has been automatically computed based on all the witness reports and may not be the most optimized."
Fox11 News added that a security camera owned by a Manitowoc County resident captured the said meteor sighting.
"About 6:45 a.m., we were getting ready for school and my daughter Molly, she's looking out the window and she says, 'dad, I think I just saw a bright light go from the sky to the ground,'" the resident explained on Fox11 News, saying that the meteor was seen by his daughter first.
Experts believed that the meteor sighting was a fireball, which is another name for a brilliant meteor.
An associate professor of physics at Lawrence University Megan Pickett explained to Fox11 News that "Most of the time these little bits of leftover solar system burn up in the atmosphere."
The professor added that when meteors are an inch or a couple of inches wide, they can plow through the sky so quickly that they start blazing. In terms of the size of the meteor sighting, Picket said that the fireball observed was about the size of a softball.
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Meteoroid And Fireball
Meteoroids, like planets, asteroids and comets, are pieces of rock or iron that revolve around the sun, per National Geographic. Meteoroids can even be discovered at the solar system's border, in places like the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.
NASA added that Meteors "are the visible paths of meteoroids that have entered the Earth's atmosphere at high velocities."
Meanwhile, fireballs are extraordinarily brilliant meteors that achieve a visual brightness of negative three or brighter. Objects that cause fireballs can be up to one meter in diameter.
For those curious to know how often it occurs, AMS stated that every day, thousands of fireball meteors strike the Earth's atmosphere. However, the majority of these occur over oceans and deserted areas, and many are covered by a daylight.
Those that take place at night have a limited possibility of getting noticed due to the number of people out to observe them.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that the brighter the fireball, the rarer the occurrence.
On the other hand, AMS advised people who might have witnessed a fireball to report it on this website.
