Possible Fireball Seen in Sky Above MD, VA, DC

A very bright meteor, more commonly known as a fireball, may have briefly lit up the sky Saturday night around 6 p.m.

A YouTube video from Alexander Salvador, shared with Storm Team4 meteorologists, shows a streak streaming through the sky above Falls Church, Virginia.

According to NASA, a fireball is an unusually bright meteor that reaches a specific brightness. They said objects causing fireballs are not usually large enough to survive passage through the Earth’s atmosphere, although fragments, or meteorites, are sometimes recovered on the ground.

There were hundreds of fireball sightings reported to the American Meteor Society across the northeast, from as far south as Newport News, Virginia, and as far north as Oyster Bay, New York. It appears most of the sightings occurred in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

So far, there have been no reports of any fragments hitting the ground and no official word on what the object was.

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