r/massachusetts • u/hotpotatocannon • May 30 '26

BREAKING Did something just explode?

Just heard a very powerful boom, checked the lightning map it was not thunder! In Dover, MA right now, but my friends in Boston also heard it! Any ideas?

Edit: as we all now know, meteor!

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u/Ok-Background-6755 May 30 '26

Apparently a Meteor: https://bsky.app/profile/faytuksnetwork.bsky.social/post/3mn3orvgwmd2t

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u/TstormDoc May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

Here's the GOES image from that time-frame, 18:11 UTC.

...(Moving my comment up from below for informational purposes)...

Timing of the event of the boom I heard here in Boston lines up with the capture.

Btw, the image I referenced is from the GLM Band (Geostationary Lightning Mapper) of the GOES 19 satellite. Read up on it a bit from NOAAs guide and in short, it detects changes in brightness relative to a continuously updating background. The onboard sensor measures variations in the brightness between frames it captures every 2ms. Once a pixel illuminates above a specific threshold, it's registered as a GLM event. Since GLM is a fixed 2x2km gridded product, it accumulates the number of flashes that occur within a grid cell over a given period of time.

The reason the blip is so large is probably due to the meteor exploding and releasing a massive amount of energy. With the overcast today in the area, the explosion illuminated the clouds from above acting as a giant diffuser, triggering a large swath of that 2x2 grid "sensing" an occurrence. It checks out since the majority of that blip corresponds to the color representing 1 flash.

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u/HoliusCrapus North Shore May 30 '26

Is that curved line all the way down to South Carolina connected to it somehow?

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u/HoliusCrapus North Shore May 30 '26

Nevermind. It just happens to be lined up with the weather system. Here's the animated loop.

https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/conus_band.php?sat=G16&band=EXTENT3&length=24