A flurry of fireballs! Is there a reason for the uptick?

A flurry of fireballs has people wondering what’s happening

We’ve seen multiple fireballs – exceptionally bright meteors – lighting up skies over North America and Europe over the past few weeks. On March 3, 2026, a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over Vancouver (a city in British Columbia, Canada) and the U.S. state of Washington, with which it shares an international border. The object broke the sound barrier and caused a sonic boom. Then, western Europe saw fireballs on March 8 and again on March 11. And on March 17, another meteor with its associated sonic boom rocked residents of the U.S. state of Ohio. Two days later two fireballs soared over California. And a day after that were fireballs over Michigan and Georgia. Then, on March 21, a fireball over Texas dropped a rock through the roof of a house in Houston.

What’s going on?

Enough people have been asking this question that the American Meteor Society (AMS) explained on March 26:

The first quarter of 2026 has produced what appears to be a significant surge in large fireball events. The data, drawn from the AMS database going back to 2011, shows a pattern that warrants serious investigation.

The organization reported the findings of their investigation on March 24. Its main findings were that there’s no evidence of an impact threat. The objects were in the normal size range of those that regularly impact Earth. But what has changed is the volume of reports it has received across several categories, including witness counts, sonic boom rates, long-duration sighting volume and the distribution of event sizes. The AMS said:

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.

An uptick in fireballs, or reports?

First, what are fireballs? They are especially bright meteors that light up the night sky as they streak across the atmosphere. They can even glow brightly enough to be seen in the daytime. If one of these bright meteors also explodes as it falls, astronomers call it a bolide.

And now it seems people are reporting many bright fireballs. The AMS has had a reporting system in place since 2005. It looked back through the data to see if it could pinpoint anything that has changed, and why.

In the first quarter of 2026, the AMS found 2,046 total events. There were 38 events that had more than 50 reports each. The average per quarter is 18 events with greater than 50 reports. And 14 of those events had more than 100 reports each, compared to the average of 7 events.

But while the AMS found the number of events (2,046) is the highest on record, it’s only slightly above the other highs of 2,037 events in 2022 and 1,947 events in 2021. It said:

The signal is still at the top of the distribution.

What it did find is there are a larger number of reports. Again, from the AMS:

What has changed is that a large fraction of events that would normally draw 25–49 witnesses instead drew 50, 100, or even 200+ witnesses. The distribution didn’t broaden—it shifted upward. Almost half of all March 2026 events with 10+ reports were seen by 50 or more people.

Dana Jason Wood captured the St. Patrick’s Day fireball from Munhall, Pennsylvania, and submitted it to the American Meteor Society.

More sonic booms

But the AMS noted the apparent increase in bright fireballs in March 2026 can’t be attributed only to an increase in reports. That explanation doesn’t account for the increase in sonic booms. Why does a fireball sometimes cause a sonic boom? Meteors that enter Earth’s atmosphere are moving fast. Friction with Earth’s air causes them to begin vaporizing, leaving a bright streak across our might sky. Meteors can zip through the air at 25,000 to 160,000 miles per hour (11 to 72 km per second). Usually, these small space rocks, the size of pebbles – or bits of ice from comets, the size of sand grains – burn up completely and never reach the ground.

But larger space rocks can survive longer in the atmosphere. They can penetrate deeply enough into the atmosphere to produce pressure waves and, thus, sonic booms. They can even be large enough to deposit meteorites onto the landscape below, as we’ve seen in March 2026 in Ohio and Texas.

And the recent meteors have been remarkable in that 30 of the 38 events that had more than 50 witness reports did include sonic booms. As the AMS said:

Thirty large fireball events producing audible booms in a single quarter means roughly one every three days.

Where are these meteors coming from?

Meteors that come from regular annual showers, such as the Lyrids – in 2026, peaking on the morning of April 22 – all emanate from a single source. That is, if you trace the paths of shower meteors backwards, they’ll all appear to come from a single point in the sky. Astronomers call it the radiant point. The radiant for the Lyrid meteor shower is in the constellation Lyra the Harp. The meteors aren’t associated with the stars in that constellation, of course. They are bits of icy debris, usually left behind by comets orbiting our sun. As Earth plows again and again through those trails of debris, we see annual meteoer showers.

So are these recent fireballs related to a meteor shower? Do they come from the same region of sky? As happens sometimes, could they be a sign of new meteor shower?

The meteor experts at the American Meteor Society found that the recent events did have enhanced activity from two directions. One is the direction opposite the sun, which astronomers call the antisolar point. The other is meteors that came in at a steep angle, not in alignment with the plane of our solar system. And astronomers call this a high-declination radiant. Referring to the high-declination meteors, the AMS said:

An enhancement in this population is unusual and warrants further study.

Interestingly, two of the meteorite falls in March were of a rare type of meteorite. These were achondrites, specifically in the subgroup of eucrites. It is thought that eucrites come from the asteroid Vesta. And yet these two meteorite falls, in Ohio and Germany, entered at near opposite angles from each other.

What the increase isn’t

The AMS concluded with a long list of possibilities for the uptick that it said it has ruled out. These include:

• Increased reporting or smartphone adoption
• A new meteor shower
• The February fireballs seasonal effect
• Time-of-day or geographic bias

The AMS also said these fireballs are not of alien origin. Also, the meteorites recovered in Ohio and Germany show they are consistent with extraterrestrial rocks and are not “artificial”.

Something the AMS is still unsure of is if AI is helping to drive the reporting numbers. It said:

When someone witnesses a fireball today, they may ask ChatGPT, Siri, or Google’s AI “I just saw a fireball—where do I report it?” and be directed to the AMS. This would inflate witness counts per event without changing the actual number of fireballs—which is, notably, the exact pattern we observe: normal total event counts but elevated reports per event at the high end. We cannot quantify this effect with the data currently available, but it is a plausible partial explanation for the upward shift in the witness-count distribution. It would not, however, account for the elevated sonic boom rates or the recovered meteorite falls.

Meanwhile, the AMS will continue to track fireballs and look for patterns and explanations.

Will the flurry of fireballs continue? No one knows. Keep your eyes, and your ears, open! And if you see a fireball, report it to the AMS here.

Plus, if you capture a photo of a fireball, submit it to us!

Bottom line: We’ve seen a flurry of fireballs, particularly in March, with reports from Europe to Canada and the U.S. Is there a reason for the uptick? The American Meteor Society investigates.

Via AMS

The post A flurry of fireballs! Is there a reason for the uptick? first appeared on EarthSky.