A week ago, a bright green fireball shot across the sky above the Great Lakes in Michigan. At around 5:30 am, witnesses across Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana saw the meteor leave a vivid green streak until Lake Huron, where it exploded.
More than 40 individuals logged eyewitness reports with NASA and captured images of the eerie meteor. At the time, many were unsure of what they were actually seeing, but scientists at NASA and the American Meteorological Society have confirmed that this was a fragment of a comet hurtling at roughly 160,000kph.
The fragment became visible around 100km above Hubbard Lake, a tiny Michigan village west of Lake Huron, before traveling 132km and disintegrating at an altitude of 74km over Lake Huron.
Such fireballs are often associated with meteor showers, but NASA said this was a one-off explosion, unrelated to the Leonid meteor shower at the time.
“This event appears to have been caused by a small comet fragment,” said NASA. “It was too small and too fast to have dropped any meteorites into Lake Huron.”
The fragment’s eerie emerald hue likely came from its chemical makeup, in particular, a high concentration of nickel. As the fragment burned up, the combination of heat and high speed caused the nickel to emit green light as it ionized.
