NASA: A giant fireball SEEN flying over Earth! Was it an asteroid? Find out the truth

NASA: In a strange incident, more than 30 eyewitnesses reported seeing a fireball in the sky above Earth. This was in the early morning of Wednesday, April 27 in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Loud booms were soon heard afterwards. According to the witnesses a loud and gigantic fireball was seen moving across the sky. The object left a trail of light, dust and very loud booming noise in its wake. NASA scientists later confirmed that the mysterious object witnessed by people was an asteroid! Not an entire asteroid, however, but merely a part of it. Check out how this object suddenly appeared into the sky and what happened in the aftermath.

NASA: A giant fireball shaped asteroid was seen in the sky

According to NASA, the object was a bolide (technical term for a large meteorite) and is believed to be a broken part of a larger asteroid. The bolide was observed to be around one foot wide and weighing around 90 pounds. It was moving at a speed of 55,000 miles per hour. In a post, the American space agency shared details about this space rock.

“Approximately 22,000 miles out in space, NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLM) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 16 and 17 detected several bright flashes associated with the fragmentation of this bolide, or exceptionally bright meteor, which was first spotted 54 miles above the Mississippi River near the Mississippi town of Alcorn,” the post stated.

The broken piece of asteroid eventually disintegrated about 34 miles above a marshy land in Louisiana.

“The fragmentation of this fireball generated an energy equivalent of 3 tons of TNT (trinitrotoluene), which created shock waves that propagated to the ground, producing the booms and vibrations felt by people in the area,” NASA added. For reference, that is 10 times as bright as the Moon.

Bill Cooke, lead of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama found it surprising that more people did not report witnessing such a bright object given how clear the sky was. It was reported that most people just heard the loud sounds but didn’t really witness the meteor movement.