'Expert' explains fireball spotted near Houston, Texas

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WEBSTER, Texas - A strange fireball spotted flying slowly over the Houston area raised a lot of questions after images and videos started popping up on social media. They were posted by a Webster man named Jordan Sterling. Sterling is used to the view from his balcony but he rarely see's anything but signs and wires. "I'm always looking in the sky to try to catch something out of the ordinary," Sterling explained. Early Sunday evening that changed. "I look up in the sky and just right there in the sky," Sterling says pointing to the horizon, "is a huge fireball with a giant fire tail on it just streaking across the sky!" He grabbed his camera then rolled for three minutes as the object crawled across the horizon. "At first I thought it was a meteor but it was moving way too slow. Meteors usually go a lot faster."

KHOU 11 News was curious about the fireball too so asked Patricia Reiff, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. "What we are seeing is a fireball or a bolide," Reiff explained. A type of meteor. "Usually they don't linger quite so long, so this is exceptional because of how long it stayed in the air!" Reiff says that when a meteor nearly misses the earth and skims the atmosphere as it comes around the world, it slows the speed down significantly. A slow moving meteor can make one full swing around the world before crashing or disintegrating.

The fireball Sterling captures is similar to the one that fell on Russia in 2013. "A really dangerous meteor happens very seldom," explained Reiff. "Even the one in Russia last year nobody was hurt by the meteor, what hurt people was the breaking glass caused by the sonic boom."

Thousands of meteors fall to earth every day. Most are the size of a grain of sugar, dozens the size of a coffee cup but the one that Sterling saw was the approximate size of a microwave. Only one that size falls a day around the entire world. The chances of someone ever seeing one are slim. "I was freaking out!" said Sterling. "Definitely I didn't know what it could've been. I thought it was going to crash somewhere and cause some serious damage! Never seen anything like that before. Ever."

And chances are he never will again.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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