For Heather Lynn Isler, the first morning of 2022 in Dormont, a neighborhood south of downtown Pittsburgh, began like most days in 2021. She was in her bed, scrolling through social media, while her boyfriend was playing a game on his Xbox. , Then, the bed shook.
The “sensation,” Isler later said, “reminded me of fireworks” and how, if you stand too close, you can feel “a rumble in your chest.”
Isler, 34, looked out of his bedroom window. It was gray – a little rainy but calm.
Her boyfriend said that he too felt something, as did a neighbor in their building. “It was just the feeling of a shock wave,” Isler recalled, “but no sound or flash or anything like that.”
Astronomer Diane Turnashk, who lectures at Carnegie Mellon University, also felt something powerful Saturday morning. She was in her home, on top of Pittsburgh Hill, 1,120 feet above sea level. His initial thought was that his dryer had fallen from the washing machine in the adjoining room.
The loud explosion previously heard over SW PA may have been a meteorite explosion. This GOES-16 GLM Total Optical Energy product shows a flash that was not connected to power. There is no confirmation, but this is the most likely explanation at the moment. pic.twitter.com/ArtHCEA1RT
— NWS Pittsburgh (@NWSPittsburgh) 1 January 2022
“The National Weather Service’s Pittsburgh office started getting calls from people who “heard very loud noises but saw nothing,” Weather Service meteorologist Jenna Lake said.
Soon, it seemed like everyone was looking for answers. (Lake’s curiosity was more professional than personal. She was in the office that morning, but didn’t feel or hear anything. Lake chalks up to the fact that the office has “quite strong windows”, and possibly also that “our sweepers Were here and there was probably a vacuum going on.”)
Turnshake said no earthquakes were detected by seismographs at the nearby Allegheny Observatory. Seismographs are sensitive enough to detect earthquakes, but they are not calibrated to detect surface vibrations that shatter homes or windows.
Lake said Saturday the wind over Pittsburgh was “too gentle” for a storm or lightning, so they were ruled out as well.
Airplanes were quickly discounted, Lake said, because they don’t move as fast as meteors that break through pressure barriers, and “we don’t usually hear them when they’re all the way up.” are,” fly at high altitude.
“Our guess was potentially a meteor,” Lake said. It is “the only thing other than aircraft events that would have been known events and could have caused that type of sound.”
Pittsburgh-based Weather Service meteorologist Chris Leonardi said the thinking was that a meteor had either “exploded or vaporized.”
One of his colleagues used an instrument called the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, which, according to NASA, “can detect transient changes in an optical scene, indicating the presence of lightning.”
Since there were no storms in the region, meteorologists believe that the source of the tremor was “a meteor moving toward Earth that was fairly low in the atmosphere, relatively close by,” Lake said.
Just after 4 p.m. Saturday, the Weather Service announced its findings on Twitter: “Heard strong explosion first over SW PA,” it said, adding that “could be a meteorite explosion.”
After the announcement, people took to social media to share their accounts and theories about what had happened. Some posted videos on Twitter, which they said captured the “boom”. A person posted a video of a backyard pond Facebook In which the fish can be seen almost jumping, as if they are shocked. The man wrote, “No sound was heard, but someone scared them.”
This was not the first time in recent memory that people have wondered about the seemingly mysterious activities.
In December 2018, the sky over New York City glowed in a blue light. People theorized about a UFO flyby or an alien invasion, although the reason was a transformer explosion at the Con Edison substation. In 2015, a 500-pound meteorite hit the sky over western Pennsylvania, triggering a sonic boom, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. More recently, in October, a boom rocked homes in New Hampshire, giving rise to theories that an earthquake or an aircraft was to blame. However, satellite imagery suggested that the meteor exploded in the atmosphere above the state.
In Pittsburgh on Saturday, Lake said no one had reported seeing anything “under the cloud deck,” which was about 2,000 feet above the ground. Lake thinks the meteor could be “two thousand feet” above the ground, but not under the cloud.
For now, a meteor explosion is the best theory that Saturday happened, Lake said, and it will remain just a theory “until someone finds some rocks in their backyard,” she said.
Turnshake, a Carnegie Mellon lecturer, said what he and others in Pittsburgh experienced on New Year’s Day was “rare and remarkable,” a “once-in-a-lifetime event.”
Despite the rarity, there is no shortage of films depicting the dangers of a meteor, asteroid or comet crashing into Earth (“The Day the Sky Exploded,” “Meteor,” “Armageddon” and most recently “Don’t Look Up”). including) )
Turnashek said astronomers are looking for such things. “If we had a large body approaching,” the best solution would probably be to “send a rocket to sit next to it, and the rocket’s gravitational pull would pull it all together.”
In Dormont, Isler shared the weather service’s findings with his friends and neighbors, mostly outside happily. The year, she said, had started “with a bang”.
This article originally appeared in the new York Times,
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