(multimedia) Astronomers believe sound was the result of a daytime shooting star.
Coinciding with this story:
If the weather was clear after midnight Saturday night and if the Lyridmeteor shower of 2012 was good to you, you could have seen the sky falling.
Every year at this time, the Earth passes through the orbit of an old comet called Thatcher, and the result is a meteor shower — shooting stars, usually about 10 to 20 per hour, streaking across the night sky as debris from the comet enters the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up.
The comet is far away from us now; Thatcher orbits the sun once every 415 years in a long, elliptical orbit. But debris from it has spread out along its path, mostly pieces of dust or rock smaller than grains of sand. As they come slicing into the upper atmosphere, at speeds of more than 100,000 mph, they burn up 50 to 70 miles over our heads. It is a quiet, vivid way for them to end.
The Lyrids are one of the weaker annual meteor showers (most skywatchers prefer the Perseids in August or theGeminids in December), but this year the Lyrids coincided with a new moon.
ABC News has the full article
