It’s not often you see a bright light flash through the sky, but on Monday night, people across Florida were left wondering what the quick, bright flash could be.
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It was a meteor. The space rock streaking across the sky was captured on an east Orange County home’s security system.
The National Weather Service of Tampa Bay confirmed on Twitter it was a meteor that Floridians saw.
Did you happen to see a meteor this evening? We've gotten a few reports about one that could be seen from #SWFL! Our #GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) appears to have captured the bright meteor as it burned up off the coast #flwx pic.twitter.com/qg9pTRcWQg
— NWS Tampa Bay (@NWSTampaBay) April 13, 2021
The tweet read:
“Our #GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) appears to have captured the bright meteor as it burned up off the coast.”
Dr. Angela Colbert of the Frost Science Museum told News 6 partner Local 10 News that while it was most likely a meteor, we may never know for sure because it never hit Earth’s surface.
“These happen all of the time around the world, so (a) formal investigation may never happen,” she said. “We may never fully know what this is.”
The next official meteor shower — the Lyrid Meteor Shower — will be April 16 to 23 with the peak on April 22, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.
According to the NWS website, “If a meteoroid encounters the Earth’s upper atmosphere, it vaporizes in an event called a meteor. What we actually see ‘burning up’ in our atmosphere is the air undergoing a compaction and compression ahead of the fast-moving meteoroid called incandescence.”
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