The incident occurred early Thursday morning, July 2, when the sky above Tokyo was illuminated by an extraterrestrial object.
A video capturing the event shows a spectacular burst of light with green and purple streaks flying across the sky in just a few seconds around 2:30 AM local time, before it faded away and disappeared. Accompanying this was a booming sound, according to multiple reports.
“I thought someone upstairs had knocked over a shelf,” a local resident said, according to Japan Times. Others witnessed the sky suddenly brightening.
Daichi Fujii, the head of the Hiratsuka City Museum in Kanagawa Prefecture, captured the fireball with a camera installed in his home in Hiratsuka. “It streaked across the northern sky, from west to east,” he said.
According to several ultrasound monitoring stations established around the world and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, this was likely a small asteroid colliding with the atmosphere.
The International Meteorological Organization also reported that the meteorite was visible from a large part of Japan’s Kanto region.
“We were able to calculate the energy of the asteroid as it entered, about 150 tons of TNT,” the organization’s blog post stated.
IMO estimates that this asteroid could have a diameter of about 5 feet (1.6 meters) with a mass of about 1.6 tons. In comparison, a meteorite that exploded over Russia in 2013 and blew out thousands of windows in Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 10 to 20 times larger.
In reality, images of fireballs appearing as meteorites collide with the atmosphere are quite common. However, an impact large enough to create a sonic boom is not something you see every day, especially when it passes over one of the largest cities in the world.
Source: Cnet