The skies over Tokyo were lit by an explosive extraterrestrial object early Thursday morning that also came with a sonic boom, according to some reports.
Videos from the event show off spectacular light with shades of green and purples flying across the sky for a few seconds around 2:30 am local time, before the light goes out.
“I thought a person living (in the condo) knocked down a shelf,” a local said, according to the Japan Times.
The impact of what was likely a small asteroid that collided with our atmosphere was picked up by some of the infrasound monitoring stations established worldwide and overseen by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization.
#Fireball in the news, seen by many living in #Tokyo, Japan🇯🇵 July 1, 2020 ~ 17:30 GMT, acoustically detected by infrasound stations IIMRU and I44RU #IMS at distances of approximately 1100 km and 2300 km , respectively. The latest signal enhancement techniques used by #IDC in the analysis: pic.twitter.com/vhqHWhlWWg
– Lassina Zerbo (@SinaZerbo) July 3, 2020
The International Meteor Organization reports that the meteoroid was visible from much of the Japanese Kanto region.
“We were able to calculate an incoming asteroid power source of approximately (165 tonnes or 150 metric tonnes) of TNT,” an IMO blog post reads.
The IMO estimates that the space rock could have been around 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter with a mass of about 1.8 tons (1.6 metric tons). For comparison, the meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013 and exploded thousands of windows in the city of Chelyabinsk was probably 10 to 20 times more massive.
Fireballs are common events, although one big enough to trigger a sonic boom is a rarer event, especially when it passes over one of the largest cities in the world. Remember to watch the sky!
