A fireball meteor exploded in the U.S. back in December. Here’s why you didn’t hear about it

Mar 21, 2019

By Herb Scribner

Did you know a huge meteor exploded over the Bering Sea in December?

It happened. NASA reported that a huge fireball exploded in Earth’s atmosphere back in December. The explosion was the second largest of its kind within the last 30 years, which makes it the biggest since the fireball explosion over Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013, BBC News reports.

The meteor’s explosion had 10 times the amount of energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

See a video of the meteor below.

A video showing the smoke trail from the #Meteor over the Bering Strait last December, produced using data from @JMA_kishou's #Himawari satellite.
The orange meteor trail in the middle, shadow above-left.

Hi-res copy: https://t.co/EXn8sFb556 pic.twitter.com/X54InkvMnl

— Simon Proud (@simon_sat) March 19, 2019

So why haven’t you heard about it until now?

Lindley Johnson, a planetary defense officer at NASA, told USA Today that NASA has an agreement with the U.S. Air Force to share data about these natural events, but it can take days or weeks to process them.

Johnson said information on the meteor explosion hasn’t been released until now because the explosion was over a remote location where no one could see it.

According to The Guardian, the sound was picked up by infrasound detectors, which can track sound waves that human ears can’t pick up on.