Apparent Meteor May Have Crashed Into GA Home

What felt like an earthquake to most people on Thursday may have been a meteor, and it the space phenom may have fallen into a Georgia home.

Either a meteor or "space junk" was seen around 12:30 p.m. above north Georgia, but the National Weather Service's Peachtree City office said the earthquake turned out to be a sonic boom.

Other agencies said they received reports of a "fireball" in the sky.

The local NWS said it first received reports of an earthquake, but then began getting reports of a "flash across the sky" near Macon and upstate South Carolina.

NASA told WYFF that the space object fell near Blacksville in Henry County and came from "an asteroidal fragment weighing about a ton," the news outlet reported.

A resident in Henry County reported a "rock" crashing through their ceiling during a potential earthquake, and the NWS said it is believed part of the space object fell through the person's roof. It left behind a hole in the ceiling about the size of a golf ball and a crack in a laminate floor, the weather service said.

The object moved at 30,000 mph southwest, and its initial sighting was 48 miles above Oxford, Bill Cooke told WYFF. Cooke is lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

It perished 27 miles above West Forest, releasing 20 tons of trinitrotoluene, also known as TNT, Cooke told WYFF.

People in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina spotted the occurrence, according to WYFF.

The NWS' Peachtree City office said though they could not track it with radar, a geostationary lightning mapper was able to be used to detect flashes. The flashes were similar to lightning, the NWS reported.

The NWS' Charleston, South Carolina office shared a quick graphic from the GLM, which the agency said was a brief flash near the Virginia and North Carolina border.

Images shared by the NWS are displays of the flashes over the eastern portion of metro Atlanta, the agency said. The NWS also shared photos and videos from the Roswell Fire Department and Henry County Emergency Management Agency.

Roswell Fire told Patch that the events in a citizen video shared with the NWS occurred outside of Roswell city limits.

Authorities in Newton County said they received sightings in or near Covington.

Officials in Forsyth, Rockdale and Dawson counties also reported sightings, AccuWeather said.

Dashboard and doorbell cameras across several Southeast U.S. states caught glimpses of the fireball that appeared to be plummeting straight down. More than 140 people in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee reported the object to the American Meteor Society.
Meteors and other space debris frequently enter Earth's atmosphere, but it is rare for an object to be so bright it can easily be seen in broad daylight.

Bright fireballs are caused by friction as an object enters the atmosphere and slows down considerably. Almost all objects break into minuscule pieces before striking the ground, according to NASA.

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The Associated Press contributed reporting.