Possible meteor spotted over Georgia and nearby states, reports say

Reports of a fireball falling over the southeastern U.S. flooded social media Thursday afternoon, and the National Weather Service said the unusual object was visible in southern parts of metro Atlanta.

The American Meteor Society has received 100 reports of fireball sightings from across Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. Most of the reports are in Georgia, according to its website.

Dylan Lusk, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Peachtree City, said while the agency doesn’t yet know what the object was, it did create a fireball and sonic boom as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

“We’ve had a lot of people who are reporting hearing a loud boom and then also feeling shaking, like their home shaking, or their window shaking,” Lusk told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So that was likely a byproduct of whatever this was entering the atmosphere.”

The NWS in Charleston, South Carolina, said on X that “satellite-based lightning detection shows a streak within cloud-free sky” near the North Carolina and Virginia border just before noon, visible on the NOAA satellites.

The NWS reported it was “likely a meteor, and they believe more could possibly be on the way,” the Newton County Sheriff’s Office posted to Facebook. “At this time, we do not have any information on where the meteor may have landed.”

It’s not immediately clear whether the fireball or any fragments landed, but Lusk said the Weather Service received an unconfirmed report of possible bits crashing into someone’s home in Henry County around the time the fireball was spotted.

“It could have burned up in the atmosphere, and, in fact, likely most of it did,” Lusk said. “The chances of something making it to the ground are usually pretty low. Usually, it’s going to burn up as it moves through the atmosphere with the speed that it’s coming in.”

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