ATLANTA – A possible bright fireball meteor shot across the Southeast sky Thursday afternoon, startling anyone who heard or felt it, according to hundreds of social media reports and fireball reports submitted to astronomy organizations.
Between 12:15 and 12:30 p.m. ET more than 100 reports of a fireball were submitted to the American Meteor Society website from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.
“This was the middle of the day, and it just came out of nowhere,” one fireball report on the American Meteor Society read from Perry, Georgia.
A fireball is a very bright meteor – brighter than magnitude -4, roughly equivalent to the brilliance of Venus in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a specific type of fireball that culminates in a spectacular explosion of light, often accompanied by visible fragments.
Soon after Thursday’s incident, the National Weather Service office in Peach Tree City, Georgia, was looking into reports of seismic activity, however, the U.S. Geological Survey does not show any earthquake activity in Georgia at the time of the boom…