Meteor Double Boom Rocks New England, NASA Reports Fireball with 230‑Ton TNT Energy

A Meteor’s Double Boom Sent Harried Residents Seething

On Saturday evening, a thunder‑clap of double boom sent a wave of shock through homes and streets across New England, leaving residents and their pets fluttering in the heat of the night. The sound ricocheted through the city, prompting a flurry of online questions: “Did anyone else hear that boom?” and “Anyone feel that?”

For hours, a fog wrapped the area, and a local radar‑storm watch had taken cautionary notes on the low‑lying heat haze, but the event rising on the sky’s edge was a meteor, NASA confirmed on Monday. The celestial body was a heavy, natural fireball: roughly the size of an elephant, about 5 feet (1.52 m) across, racing at 42,000 mph (67,600 kph) as it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA explained the meteor would have lost more than 99 % of its original mass at the time of breakup: The object broke apart roughly 20 nmiles above New England’s city center and released energy equivalent to about 230 tons of TNT. This quarter‑meter energy burst produced a double slug‑sonic wave that reached every neighborhood through the summer night.

On behalf of the U.S. Geological Survey, Stephen Sobie, spoke up to confirm that the reports of shaking were not earthquake‑related. There were hundreds of Social‑Media “Did you feel that shudder?” posts, but the seismographs recorded no work that could be counted as an earthquake, which confirmed the event involved atmospheric burst fireball not seismic shock.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) also received dozens of reports from Delaware up to Montreal. Most accounts of seeing the double boom, feeling the pulse, or watching part of a fireball glitter across the sky, could be aligned with NASAs location measurement. That said, none of the observers reported concrete evidence of a humongous rock landing on the ground; we have no physical evidence or debris recovered from the event.

Aspiring space‑consonants and even serious news viewers kept popping up online and realized that the size of the meteor, the timing and the impact are common and well‑documented for any front: NASA last year reported another fireball that created an audible double boom across the same region.

Scientists represented at the Official NASA Public Information Office reported that it was sometimes did use the extra atmospheric in space and currently remains raw that the huge fireball release was to be hot, but no particular mass was found near Cape Cod Bay. The meteor is the only one of that kind to fizzle within the U.S. An event like this is not all that common, but several meteor showers are in schedule to cross this region in the later nights of the future, so more sag to the next summer nights.

For more on the meteor, follow the 4‑minute NASA fact sheet that reveals additional hemispheric data about the widespread burst and the missing fragments.