CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) – A fireball lit up skies across Northeast Ohio Tuesday morning after a seven-ton asteroid entered the atmosphere and broke apart over Medina County, NASA confirmed.
The space agency said the meteor was first detected at 8:57 a.m. off Lake Erie near Lorain. It traveled more than 34 miles through the atmosphere before breaking up, with some fragments falling to the ground.
“That’s a rocky or metal piece, a fragment that’s floating through space, that comes in contact with our atmosphere; it’s that friction that creates that streak of light that we see,” said JonDarr Bradshaw, a community engagement coordinator for the Great Lakes Science Center. “It’s very rare, because the earth has such a thick atmosphere, that that particle, that object actually makes it all the way to the ground.”
