It came and went in a literal flash, but a 'fireball meteor' left a deep trail of thought after it passed.
"It just proves that we're part of a bigger universe, and things are going on that we're not usually thinking about," Neville Public Museum Astronomical Society's Wayne Kuhn said.
Space enthusiasts are certainly thinking about it tonight. Some estimate the fireball to be about one to two meters in size. Most are about the size of a grain of sand..so this meteor..packs quite a punch.
"The explosion was similar to about 100 tons of TNT going off in the atmosphere," Barlow Planetarium Director Alan J. Peche said.
Experts at Barlow say while something like this comes and goes in a flash, modern technology makes it easy to study for a long time afterwards. The fireball is forever recorded on countless video's.
"You can put all that information together and get a track of how it traveled and get a little idea of how high it was when people were seeing it," Peche said.
But what science won't tell us..is when this will happen again.
"It's all chance," Kuhn said. "These objects are too small for NASA or any type of agency to track."
If you want to see the next one, you'll just have to keep your eyes open wide.
