Spoiler alert: it’s not just the US, and it’s not anything out of the ordinary or to be concerned about. But people on social media love fear-mongering drama.
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Ohio. Texas. California. Oregon. Louisiana. Maryland. Pennsylvania. New York.
If you live in a media bubble, you’d think the United States was coming under a barrage of meteors.
It started with Medina, Ohio, with a meteor that rattled hundreds of thousands of people, and now, in less than a week, bright meteors have burnt up or exploded across the entire US and caused a flurry of social media reactions, questions, accusations, conspiracies, and of course, fears that the meteors are actually Iranian missiles retaliating against the untoward US aggression.
Let’s dispel the final (and I hate to call it this) “theory”: these are not Iranian missiles. Any video of missile launches and warfare clearly shows that meteor entries and missile strikes look completely different from each other. But Americans, in comfortable isolation from the endless wars killing families and civilians Middle Eastern nations, love to clutch our pearls.
The Medina, Ohio meteor was the largest and most witnessed meteor entry of the past week. It happened in broad daylight during waking hours, rather than the middle of the night. A giant streak of light through the sky, a flash, an explosion. Thousands of people across multiple states reported the explosion (the shockwave).
This wasn’t an isolated incident: whether we accept reality or not, it’s an eye-opening reminder of Earth’s thin natural defenses and the fragility of human civilization.
It wasn’t the first time this has happened in modern history. To better dispel the rumors that these are anything but meteors, let’s rewind the clock and discuss the most notable meteor explosion since the advent of social media.
2013: The Chelyabinsk Event
On February 15, 2013, I walked into my physics course at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. The hall was already abuzz with news of what had happened the previous night:
At 9:20am local time in Chelyabinsk, Russia (that’s 3:20am UTC / 10:20pm EST) a meteor exploded. Not a tiny two meter (seven foot) rock like Ohio; The Chelyabinsk Meteor is estimated to have been 20 meters (65 feet) across with a mass of 10,000 tons (20 million pounds).
That’s a six-story building with the mass of 5,357 half-giraffes.
The Entry
- Car dash cameras show a white streak blazing through the sky, then a flash of light.
- Security cameras throughout the city show streets lighting up bright white before returning to normal.
- Office cameras show people sitting at their desks, and glancing at the windows when the bright flash lights up the outdoors.
The Shockwave
There was no sound. Not at first.
The streak of light was silent, the flash just as quiet. And for 90 seconds, nothing happened. People stopped driving, started filming, went to the windows to see what had happened–and that was the mistake that injured 1,300 people.
An explosion 30-times stronger than the atomic bomb had detonated 18 miles above the ground (3x higher than an airplane), and the shockwave was on its way.
90 seconds after the flash–the blast reached the ground, an explosion that rocked cars, blew windows out of buildings, sent debris flying through the air.
The blast damaged more than 7,000 buildings within a 15-mile radius and did tens-of-millions in damage. Injuries included lacerations from flying glass, UV burns, retinal flash burns, temporary blindness, concussions, and broken bones.
We didn’t know the Chelyabinsk meteor was coming at us. In fact, astronomers were tracking Asteroid 2012 DA14, which passed a few thousand miles above Earth on the exact same day.
Why didn’t we see the Chelyabinsk Meteor?
When you shine a flashlight, you see its light reflected off objects against the darkness (empty space) around them. But if you shine a flashlight in your eyes and try to see in front of you, the bright light overpowers the dark objects behind it.
Imagine this scenario: you shine a light toward a friend, and they toss a ball toward you. Chances are, you can see the ball coming at you all the way, and you can catch it.
Now shine a light in your eyes and have your friend toss a ball to you. Chances are, you can’t see the ball at all because you’re #1 blinded by the light, and #2 all the light is reflecting off the ball and away from you. You’ll either be smacked in the face or not see it flying past you.
The Sun is the flashlight: when asteroids and meteoroids fly toward Earth with the Sun at our back, they reflect light and we can see (most) of them. But if they come from the direction of the Sun, we are blinded and can’t see them until they’re right on top of us.
Asteroid 2012 DA14 was the first scenario.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was the second.
And not to scare anyone, but if the Chelyabinsk meteor had come down at a steeper angle, it would have hit the ground and killed hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. The shallow angle made it travel through more atmosphere for a longer period of time, causing it to heat up more and explode before hitting the ground.
Social media fallout from the Ohio and subsequent meteors
The Medina, Ohio meteor was nowhere near the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, nor did it have the same level of explosive energy. Had it simply hit the ground, a baseball diamond would have been erased from the map, but it wouldn’t have leveled a city like Chelyabinsk would have.
Now in the wake of multiple reported fireballs (meteor explosions scientifically termed “bolides“), social media is alight with conspiracies, people claiming it’s Armageddon, other people who know nothing about astronomy claiming Earth hasn’t been hit by meteors since the dinosaurs, and thankfully, some people who are genuinely curious if we’re seeing an uptick or if this is normal.
Here are some of the questions and accusations I’ve seen spreading on social media during all the meteor sightings in the past week since the Medina meteor:
- “These ‘meteors’ are telling me one thing- that if something was about to hit the US mainland, they wouldn’t warn us.” Source
- “Those are not meteors. They are fragments of intercepted missiles.” Source
- “I don’t think it’s meteors. I think it’s Elon’s space crap falling apart.” Source
- “There’s a phenomena of ‘mete0rs [sic] exploding’ before they land.. in the US. We’re actively being b0mbed. [sic] They are being intercepted before they make impact.” Source
- “Three meteors in the last 5 days. Ohio, Texas, and California. Is our extinction imminent, or is this just another diversion?” Source
One argument in particular claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is supposed to warn us about meteors and asteroids. She went on to say the foil heat shield facing the Sun (to keep the telescope cold and dark, mind you) is actually an even bigger telescope that should see asteroids coming from the Sun. She quadrupled down on that claim. It was…kind of ridiculous.
I won’t get into the JWST right now, just know everything this person said was wrong, but they argued with undeterred confidence.
The Congressional Mandate
The reason we didn’t see the Medina meteor–just like the Chelyabinsk meteor and many, many others–is because this meteor approached Earth from the direction of the Sun. We didn’t see it, and we didn’t know it was there. There’s no conspiracy. I know tons of people at NASA and tons of amateur astronomers. All of them would be gossiping like schoolgirls and telling people exactly where to look if they had known about it.
Making predictions is cool. It makes us giddy. We want to be right (unless it means mass destruction or extinction) and we want to share these cool things with people. Heck, that’s why I’m out every day sharing my telescope with people. I want you to look up, to ask questions, to see something you never have before.
Hiding information, data, and news? That’s for authoritarian governments trying to suppress knowledge, gut departments, and cancel scientific grants because they don’t fit into their echo chamber of pseudoscientific and politically-motivated ideologies.
First conceived in the mid-1990s as “Spaceguard” per recommendations of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), then expanded and formalized in 2005 as the Near-Earth Object Survey Act, the United States Congress mandated NASA to survey the solar system for objects that had potential to collide with Earth.
Using both ground and space-based telescopes, astronomers scan the sky looking for tiny points of light moving against the background. This isn’t easy. This used to be purely visual (people had to notice the movement), and now with better software, computers are able to help point out dots that shift in the background for us to study and track.
The mandate requires a specific number of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets of varying sizes to be catalogued. Basically, we want data telling us how many rocks are still in the solar system, and based on their size, what kind of damage or destruction could they cause. The vast majority are tiny (under 1 meter / 3 feet), and we have eyes are several that are up to several miles wide but pose no threat to Earth in the next 100 years (mapping orbits is difficult beyond 100 years due to small effects of gravity).
As I mentioned above, finding these objects is easier if they are traveling out away from the Sun, but we’re more or less blind when we look toward the Sun. We’ve developed new telescope systems to aid us in that direction, such as the NEO Surveyor launching in 2027, but the task remains challenging.
Planetary Defense Systems
As long as we have understood that large rocks can and do occasionally explode over or smash into Earth, we’ve also thought about how to stop scenario from unfolding. Humans are the first species on Earth capable of creating defenses. We’ve theorized about using nukes to break them up, gravitational tractor beams to pull them away, and the easiest method: literally chucking a rocket into them as hard as we can.
We tried that last one. And it worked.
On November 24, 2021, we launched the Double-Asteroid Redirection Test, known as DART (get it? Because you throw a dart into a board, and we were throwing this spacecraft into an asteroid? Ha, haha, hahaha–I’ll move on).
We aimed DART at a smaller asteroid (Dimorphos) that is orbiting around a larger asteroid (Didymos). The spacecraft intercepted Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, slamming into it head-on and inadvertently creating a tail of debris millions of miles long. This collision slowed down Dimorphos by a full 32 minutes, proving the concept could work if we really needed it to.
Fireball meteors are a global phenomenon
While the flurry of exploding meteors seems to be centered on the United States, that’s because social media and news outlets tend to exaggerate and amplify stories from the US–especially now that we started yet another war and people are scared of Iran fighting back on US soil. They see videos of missiles, then see videos of meteors, and immediately connect the two.
The period between January and April is often nicknamed “Fireball Season” in astronomy communities, due to the lack of major meteor showers (Earth passing through debris tails of comets and crumbly asteroids), but an increase of around 20% more fireball sightings, larger rocks a few inches to a few feet in diameter entering the atmosphere and burning up or exploding.
Here’s a list of all the reported fireball sightings globally in March:
Obviously this is not a US-centric phenomenon. The Earth spins, dust and rocks enter the atmosphere, and sometimes people watch it happen. We don’t always know about them, and the vast majority are harmless. Rather than freaking out and making wild claims on social media, stoking fears during a war, or just straight-up denying evidence from field experts and amateurs, we should be appreciating the “wow factor” and funding scientific programs that allow us to create more comprehensive catalogs of objects in the solar system.
After all, gathering data allows us to make informed decisions that, in the long run, will protect human civilization–and our ability to enjoy the wonders of Earth, the solar system, and the universe at large.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
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