Honestly what spooked me the most was seeing nothing on the horizon to help explain it! I am shocked and grateful it didn’t break any windows or cause further damage.
Our puck showed a 90.8dB sound level compared to a 55dB baseline.
We thought a tree had hit the house because of the double boom. That was a repeated observation across all the local social media groups. The local UPS driver, who was outside at the time, said he "felt it in his chest".
Interesting this also happened in South Carolina and Ohio within the past few months.
I've never experienced this before so I figure we've witnessed something truly rare and special that might not happen again in our lifetimes.
I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"?
The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.
The only other things I can think of that would create a similar kind of blast are a volcanic eruption or something like that fertilizer explosion in Beirut in 2020 (~1100 tons TNT equivalent.)
A breakup will increase surface area and therefore kinetic energy to shockwave transfer efficiency, still not an explosion.
It would however, be incorrect to claim that the meteor had noting to do with explosions.
PSA: expressing an opinion (incorrect or otherwise) is not actually a public service announcement
The term makes people think atmospheric heating causes an actual steam explosion and that's the source of shockwave, which can't be further from truth.
If you were to witness the breakup from the bolide's reference frame and without all the rushing air you'd never call it an explosion.
PSA is false.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/watch-the-skies/2026/03/26/its-fi...
NASA states: "the fragmentation of the fireball unleashes large amounts of energy, which also generates a pressure wave that can produce a very loud boom, even shaking houses."
Fragmentation of a fireball, whilst not explosive itself (the particles needn't diverge at a supersonic relative velocity) are nonetheless part of a supersonic / hypersonic particle field relative to the atmosphere they are passing through. Expanding the diameter of that particle field will increase the size of the resultant shockwave, whether the particle separation itself is "explosive" or not.
The "explosion" then is of the deceleration (aerobraking) shockwave, not the bolide separation. But the bolide separation increases the intensity of the shockwave, with more (and lighter) particles interacting with the atmosphere over a shorter distance than an intact, small-diameter bolide would.
Some of this depends on what definition of "explosion" one chooses, or whether people are intending an explosion specifically, or an explosive sound (sonic boom). That's confounded by bolide separation, the bright light emitted on entry, and sonic effects, all of which are semantically associated with other explosive events. Language is a consensus phenomenon.
I'd tend to call the event an explosion, though not in the expanding particle field sense.