VANCOUVER \u2014 British Columbians took to social media Tuesday evening to share sightings of a bright fireball in the night sky over Vancouver and a house-rattling sonic boom that an expert says were “undoubtedly” caused by a meteor.<\/p>\n
Robert Lunsford with the American Meteor Society says a review of the reports coming out of B.C.’s Lower Mainland suggest the bright flash was likely a “fireball,” a type of meteor that is larger and brighter than normal.<\/p>\n
Lunsford also says the flash was unlikely to have been caused by human-made space debris given its short duration.<\/p>\n
The analysis comes after witness reports described a flash seen over a long range, while the sonic boom that followed could be heard from the Fraser Valley to Washington State.<\/p>\n
Alison Bird, a seismologist from Natural Resources Canada’s earthquake early warning operation, says a few local seismometers in B.C. \u2014 all in the Lower Mainland \u2014 clearly picked up the shaking at 9:10 p.m.<\/p>\n
She says the agency can confirm the shock was “not an earthquake” but cannot give a specific location, as its system is designed to detect movements within the Earth and not the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
People have also been sharing webcam footage on social media showing the sky brightening, from one horizon to the other, as the suspected meteor soars above the clouds.<\/p>\n
Lunsford, based in San Diego, Calif., said the average meteor is only pea-sized.<\/p>\n
“A meteor the size of a softball can produce a flash as bright as the full moon and qualify as a fireball,” Lunsford said . “Therefore, this object was still relatively small, but capable of producing an impressive sight in the sky.”<\/p>\n
He said the brightness of the flash it causes is an indicator of the meteor’s high velocity and not its size.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 4, 2026.<\/p>\n
The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VANCOUVER \u2014 British Columbians took to social media Tuesday evening to share sightings of a bright fireball in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194298],"tags":[39690,203927,49,48,65673,163792,155143,1942,116329,55],"class_list":["post-514546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-american-meteor-society","tag-bright-flash","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fraser-valley","tag-lower-mainland","tag-robert-lunsford","tag-social-media","tag-sonic-boom","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}