The American Meteor Society confirms four separate fireball events, all within 90 minutes, were witnessed in the Midwest, Southeast, and along the Eastern Seaboard.
A fireball is very bright meteor -- brighter than the planet Venus, as Mike Hankey, AMS operations manager, recently explained to Newsweek. As Hankey put it, sky-gazers would see "a really bright light in the sky that starts kind of small [and] moves slowly and gets progressively brighter and brighter."
#Fireball over Michigan caught on Camera (bill ongo) http://t.co/Tsa4PqtgPP #citizenscience #ams pic.twitter.com/14DyuplzQm— AMSMETEORS (@amsmeteors) September 25, 2014
Depending on the materials that make up the meteoroid, a fireball can glow brighter than the sun and appear to burn a halo of light larger than the moon. Some fireballs, called bolides, explode with a bright terminal flash as their streak across the sky ends.
Four Large Fireball Events over USA on Sept. 23rd - http://t.co/Tsa4PqtgPP #ams #citizenscience pic.twitter.com/LBKVoYJrHZ— AMSMETEORS (@amsmeteors) September 24, 2014
The reports fielded by AMS, suggesting the flashing of four separate fireballs, were concentrated in four areas -- the most reports (436) came from the Midwest, largely from Michigan and Indiana. Two concentrations of reports came from Southeast -- several dozen from mostly Florida and Georgia and another handful from Tennessee. The last grouping of reports centered over New York and Pennsylvania along the Mid-Atlantic coast.
Though it's exceedingly odd for four separate fireball events to take place on the same night, AMS says that by triangulating the locations of all the reports they can confirm that these four fireballs were separate, unrelated events.