New Yorkers have had their fair share of unusual events lately. There was an earthquake, an eclipse and the criminal trial of a former president, all during the hottest year on record and once morest the backdrop of incredibly stressful national political crises.
On Tuesday, the city added to the list what seemed like a freakish cosmic phenomenon: A meteor that had traveled millions of miles through deep space entered the atmosphere, sped over the Statue of Liberty and the tourist boats in New York Harbor, left downtown Manhattan behind and exploded high above the region.
But it’s been a chaotic week, and many New Yorkers didn’t seem to notice. Or, if they heard a strange noise, they did what New Yorkers tend to do, especially in midtown Manhattan: They went on with their lives.
“I heard it, yes, definitely,” said Pat Battle, anchor of the news program Tuesday. NBC News local, with wonder in his voice. “But it never occurred to me to look up.”
The passage and quick disappearance of a meteor over the area known as Midtown Manhattan, the city’s noisiest and most chaotic area, attracted little attention there. But some residents in other boroughs and New Jersey complained of a loud boom late Tuesday morning or said they saw a fireball streak across the sky.
Ashleigh Holmes, a spokeswoman for New York City Emergency Management, referred questions regarding the storm to NASA.
Based on initial information, NASA’s Meteor Observatory said it believed the meteor was first seen regarding 49 miles (79 km) above New York Harbor, east of Greenville Yard, a rail yard in Jersey City. The object then passed over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrating regarding 29 miles (47 km) above Midtown.
It’s unclear how often something like this happens in the New York area, in part because NASA doesn’t monitor every small meteor that approaches the planet or enters the atmosphere.
Some New Yorkers, unfazed, just shrugged. But others, shocked by the series of unusual events in the city and the gloomy national mood, mightn’t help but see an eerie portent in New York’s brush with the cosmos. Even if the meteor was no bigger than a toaster.
“You’d think it was a sign,” said Charlotte Alberts, 26, as she walked her dogs in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. “Something was brewing.”
When the city was shaken by a small earthquake in April, Alberts said, he initially mistook the shaking for a panic attack. On Tuesday, he focused his eyes beyond the East River to the sky above Manhattan.
“It’s crazy,” he muttered.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Williamsburg, Bryant Grisham, 21, a visiting resident of Athens, Alabama, said there was no point in trying to interpret the movements of planets, meteors and metropolises. It was all a matter of chance.
“It’s very casual,” he said. “Especially for New York City.”
And for some, the idea of a meteor exploding over the city centre was strangely reassuring.
Abdul Ndadi, 40, a science fiction writer who lives in the Bronx, said that with so much suffering caused by humanity around the world, the meteor’s brief appearance felt like a comforting act of nature.
“At least a meteor is normal,” he mused.
According to NASA, the meteor never posed a danger to anyone because it was so small that it would have been impossible to see it coming.
In a Facebook post, the agency explained that it monitors “asteroids that are capable of posing a danger to us Earthlings, but small rocks like the one that produced this fireball are only regarding 30 centimeters in diameter and are unable to survive until they reach the ground.”
“We don’t (can’t) monitor things that small at significant distances from Earth,” the agency wrote. “So the only time we hear regarding them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or fireball.”
Nasa said it had been able to make “a very rough determination of the meteor’s trajectory” based on reports from people who claimed to have seen a fireball or heard a loud bang. It also noted that around the same time there was some military activity in the area, which might also explain the noise.
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The agency believes the space rock was traveling at regarding 38,000 miles per hour (61,000 kilometers per hour) when it passed over New York. But it cautioned that its understanding of the event remained “very rudimentary and uncertain,” and its statements regarding the meteor’s path changed throughout the day.
For some people, the idea of a meteor hurtling across the galaxy to reach New York City represented a moment of awe.
Tina Dang, a 43-year-old private chef, wiped away a tear as she spoke of “a splash of a miracle” in a turbulent time.
“There’s something magical regarding it,” he said. “When so many other things are happening, you forget regarding these incredible moments in life.”
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