Meteor Explodes Into Fireball Over China During Full Moon Festival

A fireball streaked across the sky in China on Wednesday night as people were celebrating a mid-autumn festival and gazing up at a full moon.

The South China Morning Post reported that the fireball, which was a particularly bright and fast-moving meteor, tore through southwestern China a little past 8 p.m., in Lijiang, in the Yunnan province. It was visible for several seconds.

NASA keeps a database of fireballs, and reported one in the area that had entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at about 9 miles per second and had a total impact energy of 0.54 kilotons. That energy measurement puts an explosion into terms of a TNT detonation, with the energy being compared to the amount of dynamite needed to match it. In this case it would take 540 tons of TNT to replicate the Chinese fireball explosion.

Video of the meteor has been shared around Chinese media.

While the measured impact energy of this meteor is higher than a lot of the more recent impacts, there have been others this year around the world that carried a much more intense wallop.

In June, a fireball with almost double the impact energy blasted over the ocean between Australia and Antarctica. Also in that month, a fireball with roughly the same intensity as Wednesday’s in China streaked just off the coast of eastern Russia.

NASA sensors have picked up about 20 fireballs across the world so far this year, including a 2.9-kiloton one in March that went over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The biggest recorded fireball to burst across the sky in China was in 2009, with a meteor reaching 2.3 kilotons of impact energy.

In the history of NASA’s fireball data collection, which goes back to 1988, the biggest fireball recorded was in Russia in 2013 — the Chelyabinsk meteor that appeared brighter than the sun and created a shock wave that damaged buildings, injuring people with broken glass.

NASA’s database shows that meteor carried 440 kilotons of impact energy, the equivalent of 440,000 tons of dynamite exploding.

According to the South China Morning Post, it was unclear if this week’s fireball caused any injuries or damage. It is also unclear if a piece of the space rock that caused the fireball survived and made it to the ground. If it landed on Earth, what is left of the rock would be called a meteorite.