Meteor Over Manhattan: East Coast Fireball Sets Internet Abuzz

Yahoo!News ^ | 3-22-13 | Tariq Malik

[444Flyer]

A bright meteor briefly outshined the lights of New York City Friday evening (March 22), according to reports by witnesses who used Twitter and the Internet to report sightings of the fireball streaking over a broad stretch of the U.S. East Coast.

"Strange Friday night … a meteor passed over my house tonight!" wrote one New Yorker writing as Yanksmom19.

The first fireball sightings came at about 8 p.m. EDT (0000 March 23 GMT) and sparked more than 500 witness reports to the American Meteor Society. Reports of the meteor flooded Twitter from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.

"The witnesses range from along the Atlantic Coast ranging from Maine to North Carolina," Robert Lunsford, the society's fireball coordinator, wrote in an update. "This object was also seen as far inland as Ohio."

[Black Agnes]

I can believe that. The Mississippi embayment was a shallow sea then wasn’t it? Wonder how far it would travel with the current coastline.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Really, I was talikng in terms of more reasonable proportions. A change in the number of meteors over the course of a few years, not millions or billions of them. And for such an increase, they would have to be more or less scattered randomly through the inner solar system. I didn't say exactly evenly distributed. This, I'm saying only because there have been suggestions that we are getting more meteors as of late.