Late at night on New Year's Day, residents of the Pittsburgh suburb were awakened by a loud bang and houses in the area were shaken to pieces, CNET reported. NASA has now confirmed that this mysterious roar is not a belated, but a meteor that explodes in the atmosphere.
"If it's not cloudy, this fireball is easy to see in the daytime sky," the space agency wrote Sunday night on its Facebook page for meteor observations. "Rough estimates suggest that it is about 100 times the degree of a full moon."
The roar confused many people in Pittsburgh because there were no records of seismic activity, thunder or lightning at the time. However, NASA's GOES-16 weather satellite did detect a "strong meteor feature, which was later verified.
NASA said sensors on the ground received blast waves of meteors that ruptured as they traveled through the atmosphere, facing extreme heat and friction along the way. The space rock is estimated to be about 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter and weighs half a ton, and the event released an energy equivalent to 30 tons of TNT explosives.
Compared to meteors that exploded over Russia in 2013 and shattered thousands of windows on the ground, the event did not have much impact. According to NASA, that meteor released the equivalent of 440,000 tons of TNT explosives.
Due to the small size of the meteors over Pennsylvania, it is unlikely that any small meteorites will fall to the ground. The whole thing may have burned up in the atmosphere.
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