- Utah residents reported seeing a fireball on Wednesday at 9:19 p.m. heading toward Salt Lake City.
- It comes just a month after Utahns saw another fireball light up the early morning sky on April 23.
- Experts linked the increased sightings to the Eta Aquarids meteor shower.
FARMINGTON — If you feel like you're seeing more fireballs in the sky, you're not wrong. Another fireball was spotted Wednesday at 9:19 p.m., making its way toward Salt Lake City.
Often, people say they look like a giant shooting star. According to the American Meteor Society, it's often a once-in-a-lifetime chance that someone sees it.
Fireballs are really bright meteors.
"It would have entered the atmosphere going thousands of miles per hour, and it slows down, and as it slows down, there's a lot of heat that is generated," said Jason Trump, with the Clark Planetarium. "This heat makes this object appear very, very bright in the sky. And from the reports that we're seeing, it would have, kind of, fragmented above the ground, so it separated into different pieces. And it's very possible that one of these pieces could have reached the ground."
The American Meteor Society received 27 reports about this fireball from people in Utah, Idaho and Nevada.
Witnesses told KSL it looked very orange.
"I'm used to seeing the white little ones just going by the sky, but this one was like orange, and it was pretty big," said Lexcie Anderson, who spotted the fireball with her boyfriend, Isaac Walker.
"With the light pollution, it's not super common to see very bright flashes like that," Walker said.
Trump said sometimes they're green, even blue. The space rocks are made up of different components.
The NASA Solar System ambassador said there's a reason we're seeing them more often. There was a fireball spotted In Utah just last month.
"Right now, we're in a meteor shower called the Eta Aquarids meteor shower, and that is actually debris from Halley's comet that has come down through space and the Earth is essentially running into that debris," Trump said.
He said we're seeing an increase in fireballs year after year.
"We don't completely understand why that's the case, but it could be some variation in some of the debris that the Earth is running into," Trump said. "It could just be that this year we're having fireballs over Utah more recently or more frequently because we're running into larger chunks of debris."
He said it's very possible we may be able to recover a piece of last night's fireball.
"The hope is that something from this fireball last night is eventually recovered, because that'll help just to further our understanding of the universe," Trump said.
He encouraged people to submit reports if they think they saw a fireball, like Walker did.
"The American Meteor Society collects those reports, and then they triangulate all of that data and figure out where this object was likely coming from and what direction it was moving," Trump said. "If something could have landed, where may it have landed?"
