Reference: See hereA particularly bright fireball recently lit up Appalachia as it streaked across the night sky before vanishing over North Carolina, according to NASA.
The " very bright firebal l" was first spotted 45 miles above Piney Flats, Tennessee, at about 1:15 a.m. Friday, Aug. 30, the space agency said in a Facebook post. It was moving eastward at 31,300 mph, NASA said.
"The fireball was also detected by several cameras in the region, as well as the Geostationary Lightning Mapper aboard the GOES-16 spacecraft," NASA said.
Plenty of people on the ground also saw the object burning brilliantly overhead, according to reports submitted to the American Meteor Society . The AMS received 175 witness reports from 10 states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia — though the majority of sightings were clustered within the Appalachian states.
"We had just gotten home and before I even stepped out of the vehicle I saw blue and our skin started to glow," a Tennessee resident said. "It quickly turned to green and was right with the tree line on our property and then it passed where we were standing in observation and I saw the most beautiful orange sparkling tail."
Another witness in Tennessee said they were sleeping when the sudden light from outside woke them up.
"It was just there, a brilliant green with a well defined white tail. Like a celestial emerald," the said. "I froze and waited for it to explode like a huge firework but it just continued through the horizon. Incredibly bright and well defined. Completely surreal."
The object was an asteroid fragment, according to NASA, small but extremely dense, estimated to be just 2 feet in diameter but weighing 1,000 pounds.
It traveled a distance of roughly 60 miles, crossed from Tennessee into North Carolina and disintegrated above the town of Altapass.
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