A meteor screaming through the atmosphere at 75,000 mph triggered a sonic boom over New England on Saturday, NASA confirmed. The agency didn’t release an exact ground track, but the boom was tied to the object’s rapid deceleration as it hit denser air — the same physics that rattle windows when a fighter jet breaks the sound barrier, only far more violent in scale.
What happened
Meteors capable of producing an audible boom aren’t rare, but they don’t happen every week either. At 75,000 mph, the object NASA described was moving roughly 25 times faster than a rifle bullet. When a rock that size hits the upper atmosphere at that speed, it compresses the air ahead of it hard enough to produce a pressure wave — the sonic boom — that residents on the ground can hear and sometimes feel.
Saturday’s event was the kind that prompts a flood of calls to local police departments and emergency dispatch centers across the region. People who didn’t see a flash in the sky often report the sound first — a low, rolling crack or a sustained rumble — before they understand what caused it.
NASA tracks and catalogs these events through its meteor observation network. The agency’s confirmation put an official name and a speed figure on what many New England residents likely heard or felt Saturday — but the full data report, including any debris recovery information, hadn’t been released as of Saturday night.
Whether any fragments survived the fireball and reached the ground isn’t yet known.
Reported by the New Haven Register. Read the original report.
