Rare Daytime Fireball Created by Minivan-Size Space Rock

A meteor in the sky above Reno, Nevada on April 22, 2012.
A meteor lights up the daytime sky above Reno, Nevada on April 22, 2012 in this amazing photo by skywatcher Lisa Warren. Scientists recovered fragments from the so-called Sutter's Mill meteorite in California after an intense search. (Image credit: Lisa Warren)

A surprise space rock explosion that lit up the daytime sky over parts of California and Nevada this week was no tiny meteor. NASA scientists say the fireball was created by a minivan-size asteroid that triggered a loud sonic boom as it broke apart and streaked through Earth's atmosphere.

The fireball was spotted —and heard — on Sunday (April 22) when a space rock slammed into the Earth's atmosphere and ignited into a dazzling fireball at around 8 a.m. PDT. According to NASA's meteor expert Bill Cooke, the light show was created by the disintegration of a rock that weighed about 154,300 pounds (about 70 metric tons).

When the fireball broke apart, it released energy equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion, Cooke explained. The powerful event was witnessed from as far north as Sacramento, Calif., and as far east as North Las Vegas, Nev.

A study by astronomer Elizabeth Silber, a scientist with the Meteor Group at the Western University of Canada in Ontario, found that the Sunday fireball likely exploded in the planet's upper atmosphere, high over California's Central Valley. Silber used sound detectors to map the location where the meteor exploded. [See an eyewitness photo of the fireball]

The red bullseye indicates the location where a meteor exploded over California's Central Valley on April 22, 2012. The yellow triangles mark infrasound arrays, which were key in determining the location of the meteor's explosion. (Image credit: WUC/Google)

While daytime fireballs like Sunday's event are relatively rare, what makes this week's fireball even more unique is the apparent large size of the space rock that spawned it.

"Most meteors you see in the night's sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand and their trail lasts all of a second or two," Don Yeomans, of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "Fireballs you can see relatively easily in the daytime and are many times that size – anywhere from a baseball-sized object to something as big as a minivan."

But actually seeing a fireball in the daytime sky is a special skywatching treat, Yeomans said.

"An event of this size might happen about once a year," said Yeomans. "But most of them occur over the ocean or an uninhabited area, so getting to see one is something special."

And while Sunday's fireball occurred just after the peak of the annual mid-April Lyrid meteor shower, it was likely not a Lyrid meteor, according to Cooke, who leads NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"[W]ithout a trajectory, I cannot rule out a Lyrid origin, but I think it likely that it was a background or sporadic meteor," Cooke said.

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Tariq Malik
Editor-in-Chief

Tariq is the Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001, first as an intern and staff writer, and later as an editor. He covers human spaceflight, exploration and space science, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Managing Editor in 2009 and Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. In October 2022, Tariq received the Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting from the National Space Club Florida Committee. He is also an Eagle Scout (yes, he has the Space Exploration merit badge) and went to Space Camp four times as a kid and a fifth time as an adult. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast with space historian Rod Pyle on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.