WESTERN SKIES LIGHT UP BY METEOR

Written by: Brian Neudorff

At exactly 12:07 am last night a bolide meteor crashed into Earth's atmosphere above the western United States. Witnesses in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho say the fireball "turned night into day" and issued shock waves that "shook the ground" when it exploded just after midnight Mountain Standard Time. The fireball was so bright it actually turned the sky noontime blue.

When a meteor enters the atmosphere, it gives off a lot of heat and light. Folks at the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City, UT say this rock was big--between the size of a microwave and washer-dryer unit.

Although the fireball appeared during the Leonid meteor shower, it was not a Leonid. Infrasound recordings of the blast suggest a small asteroid hitting Earth's atmosphere and exploding with an energy of 0.5 to 1 kiloton of TNT.