NASA confirms bright light seen in BC’s night sky was a ‘fireball’ meteor

Experts say a meteor passing through Earth’s atmosphere was behind the bright flash and loud bang seen and heard by British Columbians Tuesday night.

According to Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society, the event was “undoubtedly a fireball”, a term for a meteor that is larger and brighter than usual.

Lunsford said the average meteor is “only the size of a pea.”

But their high velocity can make small objects visible in the night sky.

“A meteor the size of a softball can produce a flash as bright as a full moon and resemble a fireball,” Lunsford said in an emailed statement. “So, this object was still relatively small, but was capable of producing an impressive sight in the sky.”

Lunsford said the duration of the flash was too fast for man-made space debris and that the event was a natural fireball made of rock, metal, or a combination of the two.

CBC News meteorologist and science reporter Johanna Wagstaffe said it was likely a meteorite traveling through the atmosphere.

He said local seismometers showed a spike around 9:10 p.m. PT, and that the sonic boom is “classic evidence” of a meteor traveling through part of the atmosphere.

Wagstaffe said meteorites don’t often appear in western North America.

“But it’s always a big deal when we can visually experience something falling from space.”

He said a sonic boom is created when an object travels through the upper levels of the atmosphere so fast – anywhere from 20 to 70 kilometers per second – that it compresses the air ahead of it and heats it.

Wagstaffe said the object probably burned up, but the exact details would be studied by different groups and astronomers.

In a statement to The Canadian Press, NASA confirmed reports of a meteorite over the Pacific Northwest shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Based on a “Fireball Report” received by the American Meteor Society and data from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, the agency said the meteor appeared about 98 kilometers above Coquitlam, B.C.

NASA said it was traveling slightly east of north at a speed of about 33 kilometers per second, or about 119,000 km/h.

The meteor traveled about 71 kilometers in the upper atmosphere before disintegrating at an altitude of about 65 kilometers over Greenmantle Mountain in BC. Garibaldi Provincial Park.

The ball of fire was seen far and wide

Brett Gladman, an astronomy professor at the University of British Columbia, said people saw the fireball west of Comox, east of Merritt and south of Seattle, Wash.

It appears to have entered Earth’s atmosphere just north of Coquitlam, moving from south to north, he said in an emailed statement.

He said preliminary indications suggest the fireball was caused by the natural entry of a 10-centimeter-sized piece of rocky asteroid at the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Gladman later said that the asteroid fragment could have been up to 100 centimeters across.

“The visible meteor is the luminous atmosphere heated by the passage of the rock, and the audible boom occurs because the object is moving faster than the speed of sound (such as the supersonic boom associated with fast jets),” Gladman said.

He said the fireball appeared to be falling in a densely forested mountainous area tens of kilometers north of Coquitlam, “so if there are fragments left on the ground, they will be extremely difficult to find.”