An asteroid just exploded over Ohio with a force of 250 tons of TNT

An asteroid just exploded over Ohio with a force of 250 tons of TNT

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

A flashy fireball streaked across the sky over the Midwest on Tuesday, falling to earth near Lake Erie and Ohio around 9:00 a.m. EDT. Some reported hearing a boom loud enough to shake their houses.

The object appears to have been a seven-ton asteroid that spanned nearly six feet in diameter, according to NASA. When it fell, it was traveling at about 40,000 miles per hour in a southeasterly direction before “fragmenting” — exploding — over Valley City, Ohio. The blast had the equivalent force of 250 tons of TNT, the agency said, and “may also have shaken houses north of Medina.”

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The explosion sent a shock wave towards the ground, which would have been heard by local residents. Some fragments of the meteor fell as meteorites near Medina, NASA said, but it is unclear if there was any damage as a result of the fireball.

“What happened this morning was a daylight fireball at least several feet in diameter,” said Robert Lunsford, who helps coordinate fireball reports at the American Meteor Society. “This one is big enough to survive down to the lower atmosphere, where the air molecules are dense enough to carry sound. Therefore, people below the path of this fireball heard a delayed sonic boom produced by this fireball.”

Early on, the object did not have the characteristics of a piece of space junk — another possible falling space object — noted astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell before NASA’s identification. “Space junk has typically slowed down to sub-supersonic when it gets low enough that it would make an audible boom,” says McDowell.

It is also a mystery where the asteroid came from. Earth is bombarded by falling space dust and rocks all the time, but only some of these are large enough to make it close enough to the ground to be visible during the day without first burning up in our atmosphere. If any part of a meteor survives its journey to land on the ground, it becomes a meteorite.

“We receive several reports of daylight fireballs per month from around the world,” says Lunsford. “If they’re big and bright enough, they can be seen against the blue daytime sky. So it’s rare for a person to see one of these, but fairly common across the planet. Yet they make up far less than one percent of the total number of fireballs reported to us.”

This is news and may be updated.

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