2024-07-19 03:33:01
According to preliminary estimates, the meteor initially traveled to the northeast and around 11:17 a.m. local time, flew over the Statue of Liberty and then disintegrated over midtown Manhattan. According to the calculations, which were based on stories of a fireball in the sky, an explosion and a tremor, it was believed that the meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere traveling at a speed of 54,500 km/h.
But as people filed more reports of the event throughout the day, NASA updated its model of the meteor’s trajectory.
“We now see that the meteor is over New York and moving west toward New Jersey,” NASA’s Meteor Observatory wrote in a Facebook post. – Speed slightly increased to 38,000 mph [61 200 km/h].“
The meteorite was small, probably no more than 0.3 meters in diameter, said William Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Program. He said the heat from the high speed turned the meteor into a fireball, adding that “meteors are expected to be seen at night, [bet] not during the day, so this is a rare daytime fireball.”
Footage of the fireball was shared with the American Meteor Society by a resident of Northford, Connecticut. The video shows a short white streak stretching across the blue sky.
According to ABC7, the fireball did not produce meteorites, meaning fragments of space rock did not reach the ground, and there were no reports of damage or injuries related to the event.
Some people saw the fireball itself, others only heard a rumbling sound. Residents of Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and northern New Jersey heard a loud boom accompanied by shaking, ABC7 New York reported. “The golden retriever almost came out of his fur and the cat just crawled under the couch,” Steven Bradley of Park Ridge, New Jersey, told the broadcaster.
High temperatures on Tuesday morning may have helped the meteor’s sound travel further than expected, meteorologists say. Sound waves travel faster in warm air than in cold air because air molecules have more energy and vibrate faster at higher temperatures.
But the loud explosion could have come from a completely unrelated source, such as military exercises taking place in New Jersey at the same time, Cooke said.
Parengta „Live Science“.
2024-07-19 03:33:01