"A meteoroid-a small body moving through space-is called a meteor when it encounters a planet's atmosphere and subsequently produces a bright streak of light. This occurs because the meteoroid is traveling many times faster than the speed of sound."
"The 'boom' was not due to breaking the sound barrier, like a supersonic aircraft, but rather to the hypersonic meteoroid generating a powerful shockwave as it moved through the atmosphere. This shockwave compresses the air, producing a series of sonic booms or even a rumbling sound."
"The precise location of the fireball was pinpointed by a near-infrared optical detector on a geostationary satellite at 9:01 am ET (13:01 UTC). This 'geostationary lightning mapper' revealed that the meteor traversed through the atmosphere in northern Ohio, just west of Cleveland, and over Lake Erie."
A meteor passed through the atmosphere above northern Ohio on Tuesday morning, creating a visible fireball and producing an extremely loud boom heard by local residents. The bright streak was visible across a wide area, with video captured by a National Weather Service meteorologist in Pennsylvania. A geostationary satellite's near-infrared optical detector pinpointed the fireball at 9:01 am ET, locating it west of Cleveland over Lake Erie. The loud sound resulted from the hypersonic meteoroid generating a powerful shockwave as it compressed air through the atmosphere, rather than from breaking the sound barrier. No ground impacts were reported.
Read at Ars Technica
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