A sparkling fireball buzzed across the air near West Palm Beach, Florida on Monday night (April 13) and local news teams and home security systems received footage of his dramatic descent.
@CoralTap Just saw it in the air from Parkland at 22:16. #Meteor pic.twitter.com/E1rqXUbku813 April 2021
The meteor was spotted at about 22:00 EDT, when it tumbled out of the air and disintegrated into a sudden flash of light, NPR reported.
Shortly afterwards, Jay O’Brien, a CBS News reporter in West Palm Beach, tweeted a video of the fireball exploding in the air. His colleague Zach Covey, a meteorologist from CBS, reacted and said that the fireball was probably a ‘piece of an asteroid known as 2021 GW4’, a space rock that would pass through the earth that night.
Related: What is the difference between asteroids, comets and meteors?
WOAH! Large flash and streak across the sky in West Palm Beach. Moments ago it happened while we were on Facebook Live for a @ CBS12 story. Work to find out what it was. pic.twitter.com/VDl9pFtb3h13 April 2021
The asteroid, estimated to be about 4 meters wide, has passed the planet about 26,200 kilometers away, according to Space.com. The asteroid will now make a two-year loop around the sun and eventually swing back to earth; However, NASA predicts that it will not get nearly as close as on April 12 for at least another century.
Although GW4 made a relatively short pass across the planet in 2021, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, disagrees with Covey’s theory. tweet that “This is a normal fireball and has nothing to do with GW4.”
In general, fireballs contain any meteor that shines at least as bright as the planet Venus in the sky, according to Space.com; fireballs actually fall on the earth every day, but most remain unnoticed and fall during the day over uninhabited areas, or under cloud cover, according to the International Meteor Organization, an international non-profit organization.
Regardless of the origin of the meteor, the national weather service Tampa Bay managed it make a picture of the fireball burning up off the coast of Florida. The bright flash was picked up by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), a satellite-powered instrument that monitors for changes in brightness to keep track of lightning events, they tweeted.
Originally published on Live Science.