Space & Astronomy

Fireball produces sonic boom over Japan

By T.K. Randall
July 5, 2020

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) The phenomenon, which caught the attention of people living in Tokyo and the surrounding area, occurred in the early hours of Thursday morning at around 2:30 a.m. local time.

Witnesses described a bright green and purple flash which lit up the sky for miles around.

The object was picked up by multiple infrasound monitoring stations and was later reported by the International Meteor Organization as being a meteoroid measuring approximately 5ft across."We were able to calculate a source energy of the entering asteroid of about 150 [tons of] TNT," the IMO wrote in a blog post.

"With an assumed velocity of 14 km/s and a density of 3000 kg/m3 the size would be around 1.6 meters [in] diameter, with a mass of about 1.6 tons !"

You can check out a video of the fireball below.


Source: CNET.com

Tags: Fireball