Meteor fireball over Connecticut and other states on July 16

American Meteor Society
Wed, 17 Jul 2024 11:05 UTC

© Mark K.

We received 43 reports about a fireball seen over Connecticut, CT, DE, Delaware, MD, New Jersey, New York, NJ, NY, PA, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island on Tuesday, July 16th 2024 around 15:15 UT.

For this event, we received 2 videos and one photo.

Comment:
1) FOX 5 NY carried this headline:
Meteor? Earthquake? Uncovering why NJ, NYC felt shaking Tuesday
Some excerpts:

Based on data from the American Meteor Society, Bill Cooke, lead for NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office, estimated that a fireball was first sighted between 10 a.m. and noon near the New Jersey-New York border.
[...]
"More eyewitness reports have been posted - we have double what we had before and the adds have made a big difference in the trajectory. We now have the meteor originating over New York City and moving west into New Jersey. Speed has bumped up a bit to 38,000 miles per hour," NASA Meteor Watch said in a Facebook post.
[...]
"There are reports of military in the vicinity around the time of the fireball, which could explain the shaking and sounds reported to the media," Cooke noted.

'No evidence of an earthquake': USGS

In a statement to FOX 5 NY, the U.S. Geological Survey said it received reports of shaking in northern New Jersey and Staten Island and examined seismic data in the area.

"The USGS has no direct evidence of the source of the shaking. Past reports of shaking with no associated seismic signal have had atmospheric origins such as sonic booms or weather-related phenomena," the statement read.

The above article has had several updates, at one time they carried this photo:

© Fox 5 NY

What FOX 5 NY writes about the military activity, also mentioned in the news report embedded in the article, reminds of what Victor Clube once wrote:

Cynics would say that we do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions. We need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions!

It probably was not the military. In a comment to a post by NASA Meteor Watch, James Beuchamp, an engineer and meteorite hunter, wrote the military rarely breaks the sound barrier over most of the continental US except over two formal ranges. He also said that if a fireball has penetrated far enough into the atmosphere to create a sonic boom there should be fragments, but they mostly very difficult to find. In a another comment he reflected on the pattern of seeing a daytime fireball followed by hearing a sonic boom, just like over Chelyabinsk. This incident followed that pattern.

2) The American Meteor Society has a page with a map of the position of the observers who had reported:

Zooming out and isolating the positions of those that heard a sonic boom, gives this map, where you can see, the position of the observers:

Sonic boom reported by observers of the NYC fireball.

Note: The red dot to the far left was added for the location of Butler, Pennsylvania (red dot ), where Donald Trump suffered the assassination attempt on July 13th. This was incidentally within 24 hours of the largest fireball recorded this year, see: Meteor fireball over Brazil on July 13 - [Update: Calculated total impact energy 1.5 kt TNT]

3) Which path?
The initial and later posts on FB by NASA Meteor Watch about the path of the fireball differ significantly. The last post has this trajectory:

The path in the first post was used by FOX 5 NY in this image for their second FB post:

© FOX 5 NY

"Whizzed past the Statue of Liberty"? A few of the comments to the two FB posts from FOX 5 NY, 1 and 2 interpreted the event to be a sign, or to have a symbolic meaning. If the second path, from east to west, as published by the NASA Meteor Watch is correct, the headline and image from FOX 5 NY would not fit as well. In the image used in the current report the latest image with the fireball moving from East to West is included.

4) LiveScience has also commented on the event and its trajectory:
'Rare daylight fireball' meteor over NYC created loud boom near Statue of Liberty

Preliminary estimates initially suggested the meteor was traveling northeast and passed over the Statue of Liberty around 11:17 a.m. ET before disintegrating above midtown Manhattan. Those estimates, which were based on accounts of a fireball in the sky, booms and tremors, suggested the meteor entered Earth's atmosphere above Upper Bay and descended toward the city at speeds of about 34,000 mph (54,500 km/h).

But as people filed more reports of the event throughout the day, NASA updated the meteor's modeled trajectory. "We now have the meteor originating over New York City and moving west into New Jersey," representatives of NASA Meteor Watch wrote in a Facebook post. "Speed has bumped up a bit to 38,000 miles per hour [61,200 km/h]."

The meteor was small, likely no more than 1 foot (0.3 meters) in diameter, William Cooke, a meteoroid environment program manager at NASA, told ABC7 New York. It turned into a fireball due to the heat generated by its high speed, he said, adding that "you expect to see meteors at night [but] not during the day, so this is a rare daylight fireball."

To evaluate whether the calculated speed was fast compared to others, there is on
How Fast Do Meteors Travel? What You Need to Know!

While the answer depends on many factors, meteors can travel anywhere from 25,000 to 160,000 miles per hour! The faster ones are usually the ones that cause the most damage when they hit the ground.

Converting miles per hour to km/h gives a range of between 40,000 and 256,000 km/h. From this perspective the meteor over New York was not that fast.

If we convert 61,200 km/h to km/s it is equal to 17 km/s, and if you go to the NASA CNEOS Fireball list that has all the largest recorded fireballs recorded by their sensors and observers since 1986, the range for their calculation has been between 9.8 km/s and 49.0 km/s with a variation for the fireballs observed so far this year lying between 12.6 and 40.4 km/s. The smallest fireball on the list had a calculated total impact energy of 0.073 kt of TNT, but the most common minimum is 0.076 kt. There is no upper limit, but the largest so far, the Chelyabinsk event in 2013, is listed with 440 kt of TNT.

The headline from Eagles Journal includes the Statue of Liberty, and adds a few more details:
5) Meteor Fireball Soars Over Statue of Liberty at 34,000 MPH: Did It Cause the Loud Mystery Boom in NJ and NYC?

By Eagles Journal / July 17, 2024
[...]The agency's estimates, based on multiple eyewitness reports and observational data, confirmed that the fireball burst 29 miles above Manhattan, creating a bright flash and the subsequent boom that resonated across the region.

The event was further analyzed by meteorologists who noted that the prevailing weather conditions might have amplified the sound of the explosion. Chief Meteorologist Lee Goldberg explained that the high temperatures and a temperature inversion — a phenomenon where the temperature increases with altitude — could have facilitated the sound's travel. Warm air can carry sound waves more effectively than cold air, potentially intensifying the boom that was heard across New York and New Jersey.

6) NBC New York had a report as well:

The MSN presenter in the middle, said she heard the boom too. The presenter to the right said it was such a slow news day that they had to get a meteor in there as well, as if he felt ashamed about having to announce such news. Little does he know.

7)
See also New York City shakes as 4.8 magnitude earthquake hits US north-east

Symbolism of the location?
8) Several outlets featured a picture of the Statue of Liberty (Wiki)

The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, within New York City. The copper-clad statue, a gift to the United States from the people of France, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and its metal framework was built by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

For examples of images used, the Eagles Journal article used this image:

© Eagles Journal

And LiveScience used this:

© Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Loud booms likely resulting from the meteor were heard in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and parts of New Jersey.

Manhattan is also mentioned when the news reporters describe where the fragmentation of the meteor took place. While it is trivial for many, for others it may be of interest to know that Manhattan is where the World Trade Center was located before it became dust and rubble on September 11, 2001. Manhattan is also home to Wall Street. The Wiki begins:

Wall Street is a street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs eight city blocks between Broadway in the west and South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry, New York-based financial interests, or the Financial District itself. Anchored by Wall Street, New York has been described as the world's principal fintech and financial center.^[1][2]

Several comments on social media indicate an interpretation of the event that goes in the direction of a suspicion or even conviction of a "human-cosmic connection". Aside from those who will dismiss it as a military exercise, or deny it even happened, most will agree it was unusual, because although there has been an uptick in the observation of fireballs in recent years, an overhead explosion of a visible day time meteor above New York is still rare.

9) July 16, it was 30 years since the first fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter:
Comet Shoemaker-Levy Home Page (2001)

From July 16 through July 22, 1994, pieces of an object designated as Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter.

• Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 About to Smash into Jupiter (March 1994)
• Jupiter sports new 'bruise' from impact (15 years later)
• Comet's collision with Jupiter: Still detectible 19 years later
• Origin of Jupiter's water mystery solved: The massive 1994 comet bombardment (19 years later)
• Discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Its Impact Into Jupiter 25 Years Later

Check out our book Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection