Suspected meteor falling over Cleveland could be seen several states away

CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) — A suspected meteor that fell in the Cleveland area Tuesday shook homes and startled residents who heard a boom that some compared to an explosion.

People hundreds of miles (kilometers) away reported seeing the bright fireball even though it was 9 a.m. The American Meteor Society said it received reports from Wisconsin to Maryland.

“This one really looks like a fireball, which means it’s a meteorite, a small asteroid,” said astronomer Carl Hergenrother, executive director of the group.

“So many things are launched that quite often what you see burning is just satellites re-entering the atmosphere. But usually these don’t get particularly bright,” he said.

He estimated that Tuesday’s fireball could have been the size of a softball or basketball, or perhaps even larger, and that it would have hit the atmosphere at “several tens of kilometers per second.”

Personnel at the National Weather Service in Cleveland also heard the noise and felt the vibrations, and suspected it was a meteor. They have had no preliminary reports of debris being found.

“There might be some small fragments, but a lot of it would have burned up in the atmosphere,” said Brian Mitchell, a meteorologist with the NWS.

Meteors typically fall somewhere in the United States about once a day, while smaller pieces of space dust can fall 10 times an hour, Hergenrother said. Scientists track meteors with a network of special cameras that help capture the night sky, but more and more people are capturing them with their cell phones and their own security cameras.

“Now we see them, and dozens of videos appear all the time,” Hergenrother said.