Fireball Lights Up Florida Night Sky

A fireball that lit up the night sky over Florida and the Bahamas was a large meteor measuring about 16 feet in diameter. The fireball streaked across the sky about 10:19 p.m. Monday and was caught on camera across Florida, including by a WPEC-TV crew doing a report on Facebook Live. The National Weather Service of Tampa Bay confirmed the object, which was also spotted in Georgia and the Bahamas, was a meteor.

“Our #GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) appears to have captured the bright meteor as it burned up off the coast,” NWS tweeted. Some observers theorized the meteor might have been a piece of asteroid 2021 GW4, which passed 12,313 miles from Earth’s surface, but astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the fireball was unrelated to the asteroid.