Fireball over Lake Ontario wows Rochesterians

A bright meteor shot through the sky over the Northeast, Lake Ontario and Canada late Monday, leading some in Rochester to post on social media about a glowing green or blue fireball that lit up their yards.

According to a NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page, a fireball — defined as a meteor that shines brighter than the planet Venus — flew over the area at around 11 p.m. Monday. A meteor is a streak of light a meteoroid leaves behind as it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere, or a shooting star. A meteoroid is simply a small particle from an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun.

The fireball was first detected 59 miles above the lake and was traveling at about 47,000 miles per hour at that time.

“The orbit, speed and brightness indicate that the fireball was produced by an asteroid fragment about 8 inches in diameter, weighing approximately 20 pounds,” stated the post.

Local residents from Spencerport, Chili, Penfield and Rochester filed reports on a fireball watch page on the American Meteor Society website, detailing how long it took the fireball to streak by and what it looked like. At least 60 others also filed reports from all over Canada and the Northeast.

A Spencerport resident said it was “very bright and seemed quite large … way, way bigger than any shooting star.” Another resident from Chili said it seemed “very close to earth … like it should have landed somewhere in the middle of North Chili.” Some even said the fireball made a sound like a sparkler crackling as it flew by.

The fireball was last seen 21 miles above the town of Wade Corners, Ontario, Canada, according to NASA, and may have either hit the ground somewhere or broke up into fragments before hitting the ground, said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. If it in fact landed, that would make it a meteorite, or a meteoroid that survived the passage into the Earth’s atmosphere and impacted the Earth’s surface.

A meteorite flying lower than 10 miles above the Earth’s surface would not be luminous, said Dave Meisel, an astronomy professor at State University College at Geneseo.

“If you see the flash, no solid object is likely to land in your backyard,” he said.

Fireballs of this size and brightness happen every few months, said Dan Watson, a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Rochester.

“From the distribution of reports, (this fireball) does seem to have passed directly over the Rochester-Buffalo area,” said Watson, adding that the sound a fireball makes, often characterized as a sizzling, fireplace-type sound, is made by superheated vapors escaping from the object as it burns.

The fireball came several weeks after the annual Perseid meteor shower created a spectacle of shooting stars across the U.S., bringing more than the usual amount of meteors in what’s called an “outburst.” The last outburst occurred in 2009.

STADDEO@Gannett.com