By: Bryan Li

A meteor that flew over Ontario at 3:27 AM on November 20th and could be seen as far as Ohio and Maryland drew professional and amateur astronomers alike.

Loud booms and flashes above the Ontario skyline accompanied the meteor. Astronomers used these reports as well as radar readings to try to find the impact site of the asteroid. Mike Hankey, the operations manager for the American Meteor Society, says that the meteorite might have hit earth near Grimsby or St. Catherines, Ontario. NASA claims that the meteor likely broke up and scattered small bits on Lake Ontario’s coast.

The asteroid was not a surprise; David Rankin of the Mount Lemmon Observatory detected the meteor three hours before it hit earth, and estimated that it was only a meteor in diameter. The meteor was a fireball, meaning it was brighter than Venus in the morning or evening.

The European Space Agency claims that the meteor was the sixth object detected before it struck earth since 2008, a sign that efforts to detect possibly dangerous meteors before they hit earth are working. In the future, this could be used to warn people to shelter or to try and deflect the asteroid from its course.

Kelly Fast, Near-Earth Object Observations program manager for the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, says that harmless impacts like this one become spontaneous real-world exercises and give us confidence that NASA’s planetary defense systems are capable of informing the response to the potential for a serious impact by a larger object. Just seven minutes after the asteroid was confirmed, NASA calculated the probability of the meteor hitting earth and possible impact sites, which were refined with later reports.