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Did you see the closing window? Did you hear the slamming door?
The sonic boom heard across Massachusetts earlier this afternoon has been deemed the explosion of a bolide meteor east of Boston. Which is much more awesome than many other reasons for booms over New England and I can hope that not all the fragments fell into the sea. None of them appear to be in our back yard despite the air-concussing noise freaking out Hestia. Our neighborhood suffers so many flash-bangs to the cochlea, I mistook it for a byproduct of construction—I had earplugs in—rather than the cosmos coming home.
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I felt it and heard it (and I gathered from poking around that people as far as Rhode Island and New Hampshire did too. Massive pressure wave!)
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Agreed! People apparently did see the fireball. I'd been wondering because of the overcast.
I felt it and heard it (and I gathered from poking around that people as far as Rhode Island and New Hampshire did too. Massive pressure wave!)
My mother thought it sounded like a sonic boom from the days of the Concorde and she was right.
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May you have a meteor of your own! Per CBS, there have been multiple fireballs this season.
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"Has Something Changed in the Near-Earth Meteoroid Environment?" is a pretty eye-catching and evocative title. I've read it twice and still don't have a good grip on exactly what it's trying to say. Apparently there are more reports of, specifically, bigger fireballs, and maybe it's an actual physical phenomenon or maybe it's just more reports because people are asking their phones "what the fuck was that?" and are being advised by Gemini and Copilot to report what they saw to the American Meteor Society. Nevertheless, add another big one to the list.
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Thank you for this! I pointed to the CBS article because I had already linked it, but the American Meteor Society has a lot more detail (and statistics). Your read on it looks right to me.
"What this is, is a measurable change in the AMS fireball data that we do not yet fully understand. After years of stable baseline activity, something appears to have shifted in Q1 2026, and the signal is consistent across multiple metrics: witness counts, sonic boom rates, long-duration sighting volume, and the distribution of event sizes. Whether this reflects a genuine change in the near-Earth meteoroid environment, an amplification of reporting through AI and social media, or some combination of both—we cannot yet say definitively. What we can say is that the question deserves both public awareness and scientific attention."
(I also wondered if more satellites were falling out of low Earth orbit because it's so cluttered up there, but understand that the question cannot be answered without more instrumental data and recovered specimens.)
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Saw an awesome photo of yours somewhere over Provincetown--amazing.
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I hadn't realized there were any images of it in the air! Wow. I'd just been seeing the satellite data.
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this page has a couple.(I should have linked when I left the comment!)Correct meteor: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY-3MG0ljZo/
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The meteor is correct, but the photo is still wrong! It's the same picture from the Georgia fireball. Just cropped. Not your fault. I side-eye the Instagram account.
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Now I doubt all photos -_-
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It seems to have been captured on a dashcam in New York State! The Globe has a gif of the footage.
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Amazing
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You are a treasure.
(I remember the videos of that one. And the broken glass.)
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300 tons of TNT! That's more than the Halifax Explosion!
(It sounded to me like the steel tailgate of a truck slamming down into the street. I assumed it was the city come about the ex-pear and braced for the noise of the stump being ground or pulled out. Hestia was hiding underneath the dropcloth of my office chair. There was no one on the street. About half an hour later
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This was a daytime bolide seen over a wide area of the U.S. northeast, with viewership limited by weather.
Signatures of falling meteorites are clearly indicated data from four radars: KBOX (Boston, MA), TBOS (Boston Logan airport radar), KOKX (Long Island, NY), and KENX (Albany NY). Another small signature from KGYX (Portland, ME) might be related.
This was a daytime bolide that produced a meteorite fall right in the middle of Cape Cod Bay. This fall into water is techically called a "fishy squisher" in uber-serious scientific terms.
While all the meteorites from this fall landed in water, the water depth at the fall site is 34m (100'). Most meteorites are strongly attracted to a magnet, and these ones are within reach of a 100' length of rope dangled off of a boat. In case anyone is interested in such factoids.”
https://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/meteorite-falls/events/cape-cod-bay-ma
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I am lacking a boat, but I am so interested. Thank you!
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So that's what that was!
Not quite an earth-shattering kaboom, but pretty impressive.
Nine
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I think it was fine that we were not the next Tunguska event. I have just longed to dig up a meteorite since childhood and the strewn field of this one was Cape Cod Bay.
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It was half the conversation with my physical therapist! She asked me what would have happened if it had come down on land. I ended up explaining two meteor air bursts, one disaster, and several bombs.
(So where were you?)