Rare daytime fireball spotted from orbit as residents report powerful sonic boom

Residents in the midwestern U.S. reported hearing a powerful sonic boom that has since been attributed to a potential daytime meteor, whose dramatic demise may have been witnessed by a satellite from geostationary orbit over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above Earth.

“The latest GLM imagery (1301Z) does suggest that the boom was a result of a meteor,” wrote the official account for the Cleveland National Weather Service in an X post responding to a curious user. The explosion heard over northern Ohio may have been a sonic boom, produced as the interplanetary visitor passed through Earth’s atmosphere at supersonic speeds.

Dr. Jim Lloyd of northern Ohio posted what appears to be footage of the event to X, which clearly shows a bright fireball streaking through the daytime sky at 8:56 a.m. EDT (1256 GMT). The daytime fireball can be seen leaving a glowing trail as it flared Earthward through the cloud-dappled sky.

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Another view was captured by Pittsburgh National Weather Service employee Jared Rackley, once again revealing a fireball tearing through the morning sky. Others reported that their homes physically shook as a result of the loud boom.

The meteor’s passage was also seemingly captured from orbit by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-19 satellite, which recorded a bright flash of light above northern Ohio in its Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument.

Did anything make it to the surface?

It takes a significantly large chunk of space debris — sometimes larger than a beachball — to create a fireball meteor that can be seen in the daytime sky. As such, they are exceedingly rare.

“Being much larger than your average meteor also means that it has a better chance of producing fragments on the ground,” Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society told Space.com about a 2025 daytime fireball event.

“We look for reports of sound such as thunder or sonic booms to have confidence that fragments of the original fireball survived down to the lower atmosphere and perhaps all the way to the ground.”