“I showed the video to my husband, and he too was in awe. Neither of us have seen anything like this before. … It looked like it fell in our front yard, but people that were hundreds of miles away were saying the same thing.”
By spooky coincidence, Heather says the fiery meteor appeared on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.
Meteors explained
Meteors are fragments and debris from asteroids, comets or other celestial objects shed.
According to NASA, most meteors burn up as they hit the Earth’s atmosphere.
It is estimated that 50 tons of this debris falls to Earth every day. And only a few of these space rocks reach the ground and become meteorites.
Physics professor Mark Conde of the University of Alaska Fairbanks said that meteors travel at a minimum speed of just under 7 miles per second.
“I think there are many objects that size hitting the Earth every day, but most of them go unseen because either it’s daytime or there’s just no one there to look,” Conde said.
