"I went to turn and I noticed a ball of flame coming at an angle," Danny McEwen Jr. told the Detroit News. "…It just blew up into a bunch of sparks. I didn't even know what to think. It was kind of odd how orange the sky was behind me and this blaze of flame out of nowhere."
A brilliant meteor tore through Earth's atmosphere around 8pm on Tuesday night over southeastern Michigan. The United States Geological Survey measured the rumble as equivalent to a magnitude 2.0 earthquake.
From the Washington Post:
(NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office lead Bill) Cooke said the fireball was caused by a small asteroid about one to two yards in diameter, moving at 28,000 mph. When it entered into the atmosphere, he said, it heated up and began to melt away, producing the bright light that people saw…
In the case of the Michigan meteoroid, NASA's Cooke said, "there are probably meteorites on the ground in southeast Michigan right now. . . . I'm sure the meteorite hunters will be out in force."
More at the Detroit News: "Hunt on for spec of space rock that shook Michigan"
