Several locals across Georgia, including Atlanta, and South Carolina, reported seeing a fireball in the sky on Thursday. Its last sighting, as per reports, was in Lexington.
According to WYFF TV in South Carolina, the National Weather Service in Greenville-Spartanburg noted that the object appears to be a meteorite.
Reported between 12:15 and 12:30 PM ET, the sightings drew over 100 submissions to the American Meteor Society (AMS), with witnesses describing a blazing object, loud booms, and shaking homes.
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“This was the middle of the day, and it just came out of nowhere,” one fireball report on the American Meteor Society read from Perry, Georgia.
What Locals Saw
Metro Atlanta, Georgia: Residents from Riverdale to Suwanee, Covington to Calhoun, reported a “streak of fire” or “glowing object” falling from the sky. In Rockdale County, witnesses heard a “loud boom” and felt houses shake, prompting initial fears of an earthquake, ruled out by the US Geological Survey (USGS).
South Carolina: Sightings poured in from Greenville, Spartanburg, and Anderson counties, with videos from White Horse Road and Lexington showing a “giant ball of fire” fading above the tree line.
Other States: Tennessee and North Carolina reported similar sightings, with a firefighter in East Tennessee describing it as a “mini sun with a tail of fire” around 12:20 PM local time.
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Where Did It Disappear?
The fireball’s exact endpoint remains unclear, as it likely disintegrated in the atmosphere.
What Makes Fireballs Visible?
A fireball is a meteor brighter than magnitude -4 (brighter than Venus), caused by a space rock (meteoroid) entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speed.
Meteoroids, typically 1–20 meters in size, travel at 11–72 kilometers per second (25,000–160,000 mph). Friction with the atmosphere heats them to thousands of degrees Celsius, vaporizing material and creating a glowing plasma trail. Larger meteoroids produce brighter fireballs.
