South Florida residents were stunned to see a meteor blowing through the darkness Monday night while some footage of the spectacle was shared on social media.
Dashcam and security video revealed the fast, bright flash of light as the meteor swept through Earth’s atmosphere.
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Within seconds, the fireball disappeared from sight.
At 10:16 a.m. ET, a doorbell camera on a back patio in Parkland showed how the sky was illuminating and a Coral Springs Twitter user with a Nest camera recorded a different angle of his descent.
“Did you happen to see a meteor tonight? We got some reports on one that can be seen from #SWFL!” tweeted the national weather service’s Tampa Bay bill. “Our # GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) apparently caught the bright meteor when it burned ashore.”
Local reporter Jay O’Brien streamed on Facebook Live as he captured the meteor in West Palm Beach.
“WOAH!” he said on Twitter. “Big flash and streak across the sky in West Palm Beach. Happened moments ago when we were on Facebook Live for an @ CBS12 story. Working to find out what it was.”
O’Brien’s colleague, meteorologist Zach Covey, responded by saying that the space rock was ‘like a piece of an asteroid known as 2021 GW4’.
However, NPR reported on Tuesday that there appears to be a ‘disagreement’ over whether this was the case or not.
Space.com said Monday that 2021 GW4 – first seen on April 8 and estimated to be about 14 feet wide – flew harmlessly past Earth and was just over 16,000 miles away.
While NASA notes that an asteroid is a ‘relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun’, a meteor is the ‘light phenomenon that occurs when a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and evaporates.’
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A meteoroid is a ‘small particle’ of an asteroid.
Overall, meteors are common, though less than 5% pick them up on the ground, according to the agency.