Skywatchers spot bright fireball as it streaked across the Midwest
A bright fireball lit up dark midwinter skies above Illinois, Wisconsin and a handful of other states early Monday.
Videos show the green meteor moving slowly from southwest to northeast at around 2:30 a.m. ET Monday.
According to reports posted on the American Meteor Society's (AMS) website, the fireball was accompanied by sound and some eyewitnesses even claim that a piece of the space rock made it all the way to the ground.
The AMS has received 222 reports about the fireball so far.
"I have never seen such a large and bright object coming through the sky," Sheila S. said in her report from Woodstock, Illinois. "I have seen meteors of the meteor showers every August in Seattle when I was living there, but they were tiny in comparison to what I saw tonight."
As is the case with many astronomical events these days, people have been posting videos of the Midwest meteor online.
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Meteors are small pieces of dust, rock and ice that slam into Earth's atmosphere. Because of the intense friction produced during those collisions, the meteor leaves a streak of light in its wake.
Small bits of ice and dust vaporize before ever reaching Earth's surface, but larger space rocks can sometimes produce a fragment that makes it all the way to the planet.
These leftover rocks are known as meteorites.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
