Mystery Boom That Shook New England on Saturday Was a 3-Foot Meteor, NASA Confirms
Saturday afternoon across New England, thousands of people had the same jarring experience within seconds of each other: a loud double boom, shaking buildings, rattled windows, and the immediate, collective question of what just happened.
The answer, confirmed within hours by the American Meteor Society and NASA, was a meteor — approximately three feet wide — that entered Earth's atmosphere just before 2:06 p.m. near the New Hampshire border with Massachusetts, north of Boston.
What People Experienced
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security posted on social media around 3:45 p.m. that state public safety officials had received widespread reports of an audible boom and ground tremors across the eastern part of the state. Buildings shook in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Reports flooded in from as far south as Delaware and as far north as Montreal — an area spanning hundreds of miles.
NBC Boston chief meteorologist Pete Bouchard was among the first to publicly identify the cause, saying the boom was consistent with a meteor. GOES-19 satellite imagery showing a flash over the region with no corresponding lightning or seismic activity helped confirm the theory quickly.
"It was definitely bigger than a normal fireball, about a yard wide," said Robert Lunsford, Fireball Program Monitor with the American Meteor Society. His organization received dozens of reports from across the region of people hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake, or spotting what looked like a shooting star in the daytime sky.
What NASA Confirmed
NASA confirmed a fireball — the term for a particularly bright meteor — passed over Massachusetts at an estimated speed of 75,000 miles per hour. The energy released when it broke apart was equivalent to approximately 300 tons of TNT. "It appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles above extreme northeast Massachusetts/southeast New Hampshire," NASA said in a statement.
The meteorite fragments — the pieces that survive atmospheric entry — fell into Cape Cod Bay, according to NASA. The water at the fall site is approximately 100 feet deep. Wave heights at the time were 5 to 10 feet, and because meteorites are denser than seawater, they would have sunk quickly. The salt water would also degrade them rapidly, making recovery unlikely.
NASA noted that most meteorites are attracted to magnets — suggesting, somewhat poetically, that the fragments are technically within reach of a very long rope dangled from a boat. Practically speaking, they are almost certainly gone.
What a Meteor Fireball Actually Is
When a space rock enters Earth's atmosphere at high speed, friction causes it to heat up and glow brightly — what we see as a meteor or "shooting star." A fireball is simply a particularly bright meteor, typically caused by a larger object. When these rocks break apart in the atmosphere, the rapid compression and release of energy produces a sonic boom — sometimes more than one, which explains the "double boom" reports from Saturday.
At three feet wide, Saturday's meteor was significantly larger than the average space rock that enters the atmosphere. It was not, however, large enough to pose a threat — most of it burned up or fragmented before reaching the ground, with the remainder landing in the ocean.
The event drew comparisons to the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia — a much larger object that exploded over a populated area and injured more than 1,600 people — though Saturday's New England meteor was far smaller and caused no injuries or damage.
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