{"id":630556,"date":"2026-05-08T08:13:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T08:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/630556\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T08:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T08:13:10","slug":"utahns-spot-another-fireball-experts-explain-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/630556\/","title":{"rendered":"Utahns spot another fireball, experts explain why"},"content":{"rendered":"

FARMINGTON \u2014 If you feel like you\u2019re seeing more fireballs in the sky, you\u2019re not wrong. Another fireball was spotted Wednesday at 9:19 p.m., making its way toward Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n

Often, people say they look like a giant shooting star. According to the American Meteor Society,\u00a0 it\u2019s often a once-in-a-lifetime chance that someone sees it.<\/p>\n

Fireballs are really bright meteors.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have entered the atmosphere going thousands of miles per hour, and it slows down, and as it slows down, there\u2019s a lot of heat that is generated,\u201d said Jason Trump with the Clark Planetarium. \u201cThis heat makes this object appear very, very bright in the sky. And from the reports that we\u2019re seeing, it would have, kind of, fragmented above the ground, so it separated into different pieces. And it\u2019s very possible that one of these pieces could have reached the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

The American Meteor Society received 27 reports about this fireball from people in Utah, Idaho and Nevada.<\/p>\n

Witnesses told KSL it looked very orange.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m used to seeing the white little ones just going by the sky, but this one was like orange, and it was pretty big,\u201d said Lexcie Anderson, who spotted the fireball with her boyfriend, Isaac Walker.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the light pollution, it\u2019s not super common to see very bright flashes like that,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n

Trump said sometimes they\u2019re green, even blue. The space rocks are made up of different components.<\/p>\n

The NASA Solar System ambassador said there\u2019s a reason we\u2019re seeing them more often. There was a fireball spotted In Utah<\/a> just last month.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A fireball could be seen by drivers on Midvalley Highway early Thursday at 4:49 a.m. as a meteor lit up the sky during the Lyrid meteor shower. (Jerry Duckworth)<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now we\u2019re in a meteor shower called the Eta Aquarids<\/a> meteor shower, and that is actually debris from the Halley\u2019s Comet that has come down through space and the Earth is essentially running into that debris,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

He said we\u2019re seeing an increase in fireballs year after year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t completely understand why that\u2019s the case, but it could be some variation in some of the debris that the Earth is running into,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt could just be that this year we\u2019re having fireballs over Utah more recently or more frequently because we\u2019re running into larger chunks of debris.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said it\u2019s very possible we may be able to recover a piece of last night\u2019s fireball.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hope is that something from this fireball last night is eventually recovered, because that\u2019ll help just to further our understanding of the universe,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

He encouraged people to submit reports<\/a> if they think they saw a fireball, like Walker did.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe American Meteor Society collects those reports, and then they triangulate all of that data and figure out where this object was likely coming from and what direction it was moving,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIf something could have landed, where may it have landed?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FARMINGTON \u2014 If you feel like you\u2019re seeing more fireballs in the sky, you\u2019re not wrong. Another fireball…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-630556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}