WATCH: Bright fireball lights up night sky over Florida
Published in Weird News
(UPI) A fireball that lit up the night sky over Florida and the Bahamas was a large meteor measuring about 16 feet in diameter.
The fireball streaked across the sky about 10:19 p.m. Monday and was caught on camera across Florida, including by a WPEC-TV crew doing a report on Facebook Live.
The National Weather Service of Tampa Bay confirmed the object, which was also spotted in Georgia and the Bahamas, was a meteor.
"Our #GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) appears to have captured the bright meteor as it burned up off the coast," NWS tweeted.
Some observers theorized the meteor might have been a piece of asteroid 2021 GW4, which passed 12,313 miles from Earth's surface, but astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the fireball was unrelated to the asteroid.
Copyright 2021 by United Press International
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