Categories: Meteors

Dashcams, Tweets Show Bright Daytime Fireball Over Ontario, Canada on May 4

The likely trajectory of the fireball seen on May 4, 2014 over parts of Ontario Canada. Graphic courtesy American Meteor Society.

A rare daylight meteor streaked across the skies over southern Ontario, Canada and the U.S. Northeast during the afternoon of Sunday May 4, 2014, with brightness “rivaling that of the Sun,” said the American Meteor Society. Reports of a bright fireball followed by a loud sonic boom were reported on social media, and several dashcam videos emerged showing the fireball, showing an unusual vertical trajectory.

Experts estimated the space rock that caused the excitement as being about half to one meter in diameter and exploding with a force of 50 tons of TNT energy. Canadian meteor expert Peter Brown, a professor at the University of Western Ontario said in the Winnipeg Free Press that he is confident that the fireball was large enough that some meteorite fragments may have hit the ground. .

Compared to the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February of 2013, that’s quite small. That meteor’s explosion shattered windows and injured 1,000 people.

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See more videos, tweets and images below, and you can read a liveblog of the event (with lots of links) by Daniel Fischer (@cosmos4u).

Taken in Port Hope, ON at 4:20 pm. Looked like meteor exploding. Heard BOOM. Then rumble. Ground shook #meteor pic.twitter.com/RQfZ7r55Do

— DC-Photography (@DCPhotographyON) May 5, 2014

Here's the photo of the #meteor contrail over GTA and Durham! Saw this from Whitby…. Seeing this made my day pic.twitter.com/gINzrFeMc9

— Veronica (@iVeronica) May 4, 2014

Sonic boom you felt. RT @island_gurl75: #meteor strikes or explodes near #Peterborough. We felt 4 big bangs, felt like a car hit the house!

— Dënnis (@DennisOBrienJr) May 4, 2014

Read more news reports at the American Meteor Society, Globe and Mail, and Global News.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/