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Half Of The East Coast Saw A Bright Green Meteor Last Night

Jessica Orwig   

Half Of The East Coast Saw A Bright Green Meteor Last Night
LifeScience2 min read

meteor in us

Benwood Police Department

Meteor sighted along east coast in the US last night.

At around 6:20 pm EST on Nov. 3, reports started trickling in that a brilliantly bright, green meteor was tracing its way across the night sky.

Over the course of the night, the American Meteor Society (AMS) received over 250 reports of meteor sightings.

Some of the first tweets that came in about the meteor indicated it was certainly a sight worth seeing:

"Folks in Virginia say it was huge - it looked like a bottle rocket," Drew Curtis tweeted.

Another twitter user going by @BIONIC_OLE said: "I just saw the biggest "shooting star" meteor ever. It was insane!!"

And NASA's Bill Cooke confirmed with ABC's Good Morning America that the object does, indeed, appear to be a meteor.

The signings occurred all over the Eastern US - from South Carolina up to Ohio.

Here's a video caught on a Benwood, Virginia Police Department dash camera:

us meteor

Benwood Police Department

Benwood Police Department capture video footage of last night's meteor.

The reports came from as far west as the state of Indiana reaching as far east as the Virginia coast.

Below is a heat map from the AMS showing the expanse of the reports across the midwest and east coast. Red indicates the highest volume of reports.

heat map of meteor siting from AMS website

American Meteor Society

Heat map of last night's meteor sitings.

The meteor could be part of the Taurid meteor shower that is happening all month. The meteor likely entered Earth's atmosphere above western West Virginia and then traveled eastward across the sky eventually impacting between Webster County and the Randolph County, West Virginia.

The AMS predicted this path and impact site from the reports they received. The projection is shown below.

meteor path

American Meteor Society

Possible path the meteor took across the sky last night.

According to ABC's Chief Meteorologist Sean Sublette, the green coloring is an indication of magnesium molecules in the meteor.

There were other reports last night of a bright meteor-like light in the skies over Chicago. However, both NASA's Bill Cooke and AMS said it was moving too slowly to be a meteor and is likely a piece of space junk burning up.

Check out both events in the video below:


Did you see a meteor last night? Send us a picture or video.

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