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Meteors are common, but Tuesday’s was not. Here’s why
by: Dave NethersPosted: Mar 17, 2026 / 04:51 PM EDT
Updated: Mar 18, 2026 / 10:56 AM EDT
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CLEVELAND (WJW) — Residents across a vast area of Northeast Ohio feared an earthquake, some thought it was a plane crash, others an explosion early Tuesday as the ground shook and people heard a massive “boom” from Painesville to Canton, from Solon to Medina.
The sound was heard and felt at the Cleveland Forecast Office of the National Weather Service, where forecasters reported for work Tuesday morning expecting a wintry, snowy day — and soon realized this was not weather-related.
Radar and satellite images intended to detect lightning flashes showed an unmistakable signature of what is called a bolide.
NASA confirms boom was 17,000-pound meteor
It appeared on satellite as a series of 13 dots, starting in the middle of Lake Erie, almost directly over the border between the United States and Canada.
“I’ve seen enough of these over the years to just recognize this isn’t what lightning would look like. Even in a convective storm, you wouldn’t expect this. The clouds are shaped different, so it doesn’t match with the meteorology,” said Scott Rudlosky, a lightning specialist working at the weather service office in Cleveland.
“A bolide is a bright meteor that explodes in the atmosphere. There’s hundreds of those a day. The ones that are bright enough for our satellites to see — there’s probably a dozen or more every single day. Its kind of uncommon for one this big and bright to explode over a populated area. That’s what makes this somewhat unique,” said Rudlosky.
Bill Cooke of NASA’s meteor environment office in Alabama, said there were numerous eyewitness reports across the entire mid-Atlantic region.
“People saw this in the daylight and, using their eyewitness reports, it first became visible at an altitude somewhere around 50 miles above Lake Erie,” Cooke said.
From the satellite images, it appears that the meteor first broke up over the lake, but as it continued on its north-to-south trajectory, there was a second massive explosion over land.
“Almost like a shotgun shot, right? So when it shatters, it shatters into lots of pieces. Some of them are so small they just break up or burn up right away, and that’s that bright optical energy you are seeing. But some of them are big enough that they keep going and that will explode a second time,” said Rudlosky.
It may have been the second explosion that generated sound waves NASA said were detected as far as 600 miles away.
“Based on the energy it unleashed, this object was about 6 feet in diameter and it had a mass of about 17,000 pounds,” said Cooke — about 8 tons.
The initial data showed the meteor may have been traveling as fast as 40,000 miles per hour, or about 50 times the speed of sound, when the first flashes were seen — which Cooke said is actually slow in meteor terms.
“So it started above Lake Erie and headed south towards Medina, Ohio, and it broke apart just a little bit north of Medina. And when it did so, this 6-foot hunk of rock unleashed an energy of about 250 tons of TNT,” said Cooke.
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Cooke said the initial mapping of its trajectory shows that the meteor may have come from an asteroid belt somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, about 200 million miles away.
It is almost a certainty that fragments of the meteor did reach the ground in Northeast Ohio.
“Doppler weather radar shows pieces of this object, meteorites falling to the ground in Medina County, so there are meteorites on the ground in Medina County,” said Cooke.
“I wished it would have happened closer to me, because I could go look for pieces of it. But I’m sure Ohio will be visited by meteorite hunters in the near future, so you guys will probably get a mini-gold rush from meteorite hunters looking for those rocks,” he said.
