On March 30th, 2022 a loud explosion was heard for hundreds of miles leaving residents of Bloomington wondering. Some sought answers from Camp Atterbury which later denied having caused the “boom”. Other residents thought it was thunder, an electrical explosion, or possibly the start of war. A fireball meteor is the last thing that residents thought they heard that day.
Early March set off the season of meteors that can be visible at night. According to the American Meteor Society, at the beginning of March you can see between “2-4 sporadic meteors per hour”. These numbers will slowly increase throughout the summer with the end of September bringing 8-16 meteors at night.
Professor Caty Pilachowski is an astronomer who teaches evolution of stars and the chemical history of the Milky Way Galaxy at Indiana University and holds the Kirkwood Chair in Astronomy.
Meteors occur between 50 and 75 miles above the ground when approaching Earth with speeds ranging between 25,000 and 160,000 miles per hour. Speeds range depending on whether the meteor is approaching Earth head on or catching up to it relative to it’s movement in space. Earth moves through space in its orbit at 67,000 mph.
The boom was heard from Indianapolis to as far as northern Kentucky with 168 miles in between the two cities. Meteors emit a loud boom due to breaking through the atmosphere, creating a sonic boom. These are similar sounds to when airplanes break the sound barrier.
As of April 14, the first interstellar meteor was confirmed by the U.S. military to have fallen in 2014 in Papua New Guinea. Interstellar meteors, unlike regular meteors, are not gravitationally bound to a star while traveling through space. Most meteors that encounter Earth’s orbit are from within our solar system, meaning the meteor that fell in 2014 was produced from a star and kicked out of another solar system. There is only one other interstellar body to be discovered which came in the form of a comet in 2019.
The next time you hear a loud explosion over Bloomington, you may think it is an electrical explosion, a thunder bolt, or a war starting, but now you know it may in fact just be a fireball meteor.
