Watch A Fireball Burn Up Across The New England Sky

A fireball burned across the New England skies the day after Christmas, lighting up the evening.

The super-bright meteor flashed close to 6 p.m. EST on Dec. 26, exciting and surprising people around the northeasternmost United States.

“Looks like a meteor!” Maine’s Toby Jutras wrote when he posted a video of the phenomenon on Facebook.

Jutras was posting from a town in southwest Maine near the capital Augusta, but the fireball was caught on camera in other places as well. That includes Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is near the border with Maine. Over there, someone with a webcam overlooking a harbor captured the meteor streaking across the water.

Others on social media reported spotting the speeding space rock over central Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and eastern Canada.

Fireball is a term used to describe an especially bright meteor, a space rock that is burning up as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. That rock could be an asteroid or a meteoroid that was speeding around the solar system before getting caught up in the planet’s gravity. If any pieces of the object survive the fiery fall to Earth, a rock we would find on the ground would be called a meteorite.

It was unclear whether the fireball on Dec. 26 was strong enough or close enough to a U.S. government sensor to be reported on the fireball database that NASA keeps through its Center for Near Earth Object Studies. The public database goes back to 1988 but its most recent entry is from Dec. 15.

That last entry was a powerful one: It had an impact energy of 6.4 kilotons, which is the equivalent of the power from 6,400 tons of dynamite blowing up. According to the coordinates on the NASA database, that fireball streaked over a place in eastern Russia, on the Bering Sea coast, during its peak.

Russia is also the location of the biggest fireball on the database, although it was in south-central Russia, near the country’s border with Kazakhstan. In Chelyabinsk in 2013, a meteor that looked brighter than the sun zoomed in and created a shock wave that shattered windows. It had an explosive energy of 440 kilotons.

Astronomy expert Kenneth Janes told the Boston Herald that the Boxing Day meteor above New England was probably comparable in size to a golf ball and moving between 10 and 30 miles a second during its journey several miles up.

“The ones that would do really serious damage are rare, but not impossible,” Janes told the Boston Herald. “These are simply bits of rock in orbit around the sun. These occur every day somewhere on the Earth.”