PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania: Loud explosions heard in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 1 were caused by an exploding meteor, according to NASA.
Continuing for some minutes, the explosions were audible prior to 11:30 a.m. The overcast weather conditions hindered clear visibility of the meteor in the skies as it exploded, as per a posting on the government agency’s official Meteor Watch Facebook page.
Information received by a monitoring station recorded the fireball-generated blast wave, thereby aiding NASA to obtain an estimation of the produced energy.
“If we make a reasonable assumption as to the meteor’s speed (45,000 miles per hour), we can ballpark the object’s size at about a yard in diameter, with a mass close to half a ton,” NASA posted.
Allegheny County, located southwest of Pennsylvania and includes Pittsburgh, confirmed the receipt of well over nine hundred reports on January 1 of a thunderous explosion, coupled with quaking in the South Hills suburb, as per information tweeted by the county.
