NASA has confirmed that the fireball seen by numerous people in New York on Tuesday morning was a meteor that passed at about 38,000 miles per hour (61,000 kilometers per hour) toward New Jersey before disintegrating.

“More eyewitness reports have been posted. We have twice as much information as we had before on the meteor that originated over New York City. moving west toward New Jersey,” NASA’s meteor monitoring department said in an update on social media.

Local media reported yesterday the sighting of a fireball and explosions and tremors between 10 a.m. local time (14:00 GMT) and noon. Estimates by experts on the American Meteor Society website have determined that the meteor was first seen at an altitude of 70 kilometers above Upper Bay, east of Greenville Yard, and descending at a steep angle of only 18 degrees from the vertical.

The fireball, with this trajectory, “passed over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrating 47 kilometers above midtown Manhattan”the agency said. Although many people have the impression that NASA tracks everything in space, the agency reminds us that it only “tracks asteroids that are capable of posing a danger to us, the inhabitants of Earth.”

Not so small rocks like “The ones that produce this fireball are only about 30 centimeters in diameter and are unable to survive” on their way to Earth. “We don’t track, we can’t really, things that small at significant distances from Earth, so the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or a fireball,” he adds.

A “meteoroid” is a celestial body that breaks away from larger bodies, such as planets or asteroids. The Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences explains that if it is attracted by the Earth’s gravity and crosses the atmosphere, giving rise to a shooting star, it is called a ‘meteor’, a term also used to name any phenomenon that originates in the atmosphere, such as snow or rainbows. If this body falls to the Earth’s surface, it is called a “meteorite.”