Residents of the Midwestern United States reported hearing a loud boom that has since been attributed to a potential daytime meteorwhose dramatic demise may have been seen by a satellite from geostationary orbit over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above Earth.
“The latest GLM images (1301Z) suggest the boom was the result of a meteor,” wrote the official account for the Cleveland National Weather Service in an X post reply to a curious user. The explosion heard over northern Ohio may have been a sonic boom, produced as the interplanetary visitor passed through Earth’s atmosphere at supersonic speeds.
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Video from our bus garage camera. A meteor in the sky. This is authentic. pic.twitter.com/8XhvovGh1zMarch 17, 2026
Another sighting was captured by a Pittsburgh National Weather Service employee Jared Rackleyand once again reveals a ball of fire tearing through the morning sky. Others reported their homes physically shaking as a result of the loud boom.
One of our staff members, Jared Rackley, caught this morning’s meteor on camera from the Pittsburgh area. pic.twitter.com/2LdqOpChtiMarch 17, 2026
The meteor’s passage was also apparently captured from orbit by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-19 satellitewho recorded a bright flash of light over northern Ohio in his Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument.
Has anything come to the surface?
It takes a significantly large chunk of space debris – sometimes larger than a beach ball – to make a fireball meteor that can be seen in the daytime sky. As such, they are extremely rare.
“Being much larger than your average meteor also means it has a better chance of producing fragments on the ground,” Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society told Space.com about a 2025 fireball event during the day.
“We look for reports of sounds like thunder or sonic booms to have confidence that fragments of the original fireball survived down into the lower atmosphere and perhaps all the way to the ground.”
