For the sixth time in history, on November 19, at half past three in the morning (EST), astronomers managed to spot a small asteroid, A bright green fireball streaked across the sky over the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada shortly before crashing into Lake Ontario in the dead of night in dramatic fashion.

Witnesses reported seeing a helicopter-like object drifting silently through the air before lighting up large swaths of the night like a huge lightning bolt. After about 10 seconds it disappeared. No damage or casualties were immediately reported.

Among the witnesses who took photos and video of the green fireball was Dereck Bowen of Brantford, Ontario, who managed to capture the fireball’s descent with a GoPro camera set to automatically record the sky the night.

A 30-second exposure of the sky shows the moment the meteor rises overhead, with the bright green trail of rock hurtling towards Earth and illuminating the clouds around it.

Small asteroid less than a meter long

On the scientific side, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (JAR) I declare that a probable meteorite fell from the sky east of Grimsby, Ontario, Canada. For his part, astronomer David Rankin saw a 0.7 meter long asteroid – not very big in terms of asteroids – in observations made from the sky survey of Mount Lemmon in Arizona.

NASA has confirmed that it was a small meteor that shattered into hundreds of pieces upon entering our planet. According to NASA, most of these pieces fell directly into Lake Ontario, although some small pieces may have impacted the south shore of the lake.

Space authorities have named the green meteor 2022 WJ1.

University of Western Ontario astronomers are advising residents of certain areas of the Lake Ontario shoreline to “check their yards and driveways for new black rocks, which could be meteorites.”

Several researchers are already working on the search for possible fragments of space chunks off the coast.

The bright meteor’s color, while spectacular, is the product of an atmospheric and chemical reaction with space rock. According to astronomers from Cornell University, the color of meteors or shooting stars is influenced by two factors: the chemical composition of the meteoroid and the interaction of its atoms with molecules in our atmosphere.

Edited by Felipe Espinosa Wang.