Bright light seen in B.C.’s night sky was a ‘fireball’ meteor, NASA confirms

A meteor travelling through the earth’s atmosphere was behind a bright flash and loud boom seen and heard by British Columbians Tuesday night, experts say.

The event was “undoubtedly a fireball,” according to Robert Lunsford with the American Meteor Society, the term for a meteor that is larger and brighter than normal.

Lunsford said average meteors are “only the size of a pea.”

But their high velocity can make the small objects visible in the night sky.

“A meteor the size of a softball can produce a flash as bright as the full moon and qualify as a fireball,” Lunsford said in an emailed statement. “Therefore, this object was still relatively small, but capable of producing an impressive sight in the sky.”

Lunsford said the duration of the flash was too fast to be human-made space debris and added the event was a natural fireball made of stone, metal or a combination of both.

Johanna Wagstaffe, a meteorologist and science reporter for CBC News, said it was likely a meteor that travelled through the atmosphere.

She noted local seismographs showed a spike around 9:10 p.m. PT, and that the sonic boom is “classic evidence” of a meteor travelling through part of the atmosphere.

Wagstaffe said meteors don’t often show up in western North America.

“But it’s always a big deal when we can visually experience something falling from space.”

She said a sonic boom is created when an object travels through the upper levels of the atmosphere so fast — anywhere from 20 to 70 kilometres per second — that it compresses the air ahead of it and heats it up.

Wagstaffe said the object likely burned up, but the exact details will be studied by various groups and astronomers.

In a statement to The Canadian Press, NASA confirmed reports of a meteor over the Pacific Northwest shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Based on “fireball reports” received by the American Meteor Society and data from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, the agency said the meteor became visible about 98 kilometres above Coquitlam, B.C.

NASA said it was travelling slightly east of north at a speed of about 33 kilometres per second, or about 119,000 km/h.

The meteor traversed about 71 kilometres through the upper atmosphere before disintegrating at an altitude of about 65 kilometres above Greenmantle Mountain in B.C.’s Garibaldi Provincial Park.

Fireball observed far and wide

University of British Columbia astronomy professor Brett Gladman said people observed the fireball as far west as Comox, as far east as Merritt and as far south as Seattle, Wash.

He said in an emailed statement that it appeared to have entered the earth’s atmosphere north of Coquitlam, moving south to north.

He said initial indications show the fireball was caused by the natural entry of a 10-centimetre sized rocky asteroid fragment at the top of the earth’s atmosphere. Gladman later added that the asteroid fragment could be up to 100 centimetres in size.

“The visible meteor is the glowing atmosphere heated by rock’s passage and the audible boom is because the speed of the object is faster than the speed of sound (like the supersonic boom related to fast jet planes),” Gladman said.

He said the fireball appeared to descend tens of kilometres north of Coquitlam, into a heavily forested, mountainous area, “so if there are fragments that survived to the ground, finding them will be extremely difficult.”