Fireball spotted over Southeast may have been caused by meteor

ATLANTA — A rarely seen daytime fireball that may have been dropped by a meteor was spotted across the Southeastern U.S. on Thursday, creating a sonic boom that blared through the region.

The American Meteor Society received numerous reports of a fireball over the region on Thursday afternoon, its website shows. The reports came during the Bootids meteor shower, a lower-level meteor shower that is ongoing this week, according to an American Meteor Society list.

"It looks to be a 'daytime fireball' that caused a sonic boom. This is usually indicative of a (meteor) dropping a fireball, but not always," Mike Hankey, operations manager for the American Meteor Society, told CNN.

Seeing a daytime fireball is a rare occurrence: Fireballs are easier to view at night, but have to be much brighter to be visible during the day, the American Meteor Society says. It's also "quite rare" for sonic booms to be heard on the ground when a fireball occurs, according to the organization.

It remains unclear how many fireballs fell and whether they hit the ground.

Between 11:51 a.m. and 11:56 a.m. Thursday, satellite-based lighting detection showed "a streak within cloud-free sky over the NC/VA border," the National Weather Service in Charleston said on the social platform X, correcting the timeframe it had shared in an earlier post.

Analysis of satellite-based lightning detection by CNN shows additional signatures over the Atlanta area. Elsewhere in Georgia, dashcam video taken at approximately 12:30 p.m. in Forsyth shows a fireball descending to the ground. And in Newton County, the sheriff's office said it received a notification from the National Weather Service that it was likely a meteor, and "more could possibly be on the way."

A Henry County, Georgia, resident reported that a "rock" fell through their ceiling around the same time the fireball occurred, according to the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. The object broke through the roof and ceiling before cracking the flooring inside the home.

In Lexington County, South Carolina, dashcam video shows a big flash of light falling through the sky Thursday. South Carolina's emergency management division told CNN it is monitoring the situation.

Brenda Eckard, 64, from Gilbert, South Carolina, said she was driving home when she saw a "big flash in the sky come down and disappear."

She first thought it was a meteor that "almost looked like a firework," Eckard told CNN Thursday. Eckard then called her husband to check if their house was still standing.

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A fireball is an unusually bright meteor that reaches a magnitude of over minus 4, which is brighter than Venus, according to the American Meteor Society. Thursday's fireball reached a magnitude of around minus 14, the organization told CNN, which would make it brighter than the full moon.

The brighter the fireball, the more rare the event is, according to the American Meteor Society. "Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth's atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight," the organization says.

Thursday's fireball was a special type called a bolide that explodes in a bright terminal flash, according to the organization. Bolides happen several dozen times a year, "when our planet is impacted by asteroids too small to reach the ground but large enough to explode upon impact with Earth's atmosphere," according to NASA.

CNN has reached out to emergency management officials in North Carolina and Tennessee. The North American Aerospace Defense Command directed questions to NASA. CNN has reached out to NASA.

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