If you witnessed a bright light flash across the sky Friday night in Chatham-Kent, you weren't imagining things.
A fireball passed over the region around 10:07 p.m.
Peter Brown, a Western University professor, meteor scientist and planetary astronomer tweeted a video of the event. Brown described it as being "as bright as [the] full Moon."
According to the NASA All Sky Fireball Network, observers in Ontario, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania reported seeing a bright fireball in the sky on Friday evening. The event was captured by several all-sky meteor cameras belonging to the NASA All Sky Fireball Network and the Southern Ontario Meteor Network operated by Western University.
https://twitter.com/pgbrown/status/1365669835108192257
According to NASA, an initial analysis of the video shows that the meteor appears 90 km above Erieau on the northern shore of Lake Erie. It moved northwest at a speed of 105,800 km per hour as it crossed the Canada-U.S. border before ending 32 km above Fair Haven, MI.
"At its brightest, the fireball rivalled the quarter Moon in intensity," read a statement on the NASA All Sky Fireball Network. "Combining this with the speed gives the fragment a mass of at least 2 kilograms and a diameter of approximately 12 centimetres."
It's believed that the meteor was caused by a fragment of a Jupiter family comet although an asteroidal origin is also possible.
