The source of a thunderous boom over Salt Lake City? Maybe a meteorite.

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When a loud bang was heard throughout the Salt Lake City area over the weekend, it confused residents. Was the seemingly inexplicable noise an earthquake or a construction noise? Maybe it was a military experiment or something from space?

After hearing the explosion as it played on Saturday morning, Utah Governor Spencer Cox (right) tweeted that all signs point to a meteor.

Several doorbell cameras picked up the sound of pushing, which was heard in northern Utah and southern Idaho. Then there was a mystery to solve: Cox said the cause of the explosion was not an earthquake, which the University of Utah has independently confirmed, or related to any military testing, as was the case in a similar accident in April.

The National Weather Service’s Salt Lake City office found itself playing the detective, using satellite data from the Geostationary Operational Satellite System (GOES) to survey the skies over Salt Lake City. I looked for flashes of lightning, even though lightning wasn’t really what he was looking for.

In support of the meteor theory in #boom this morning in #Utah, the two reddish pixels appearing over Davis and Morgan counties are from the GOES-17 Lightning Mapper, but not associated with evidence of thunderstorm activity in satellite or radar. Likely a meteor trail/flicker #utwx pic.twitter.com/qRO2Rsfca7

– NWS Salt Lake City (@NSWSaltLakeCity) August 13, 2022

As it turns out, the powerful GOES satellite can also pick up bright flashes emitted by exploding meteors.

Sure enough, the satellite picked up two bright flashes on Saturday morning. The flashes do not appear to be consistent with any thunderstorm activity in the area, which means that it is likely that the satellite picked up a passing meteor.

In the end, video evidence from Snowbasin Ski Resort in Utah provided all but the absolute evidence that Saturday’s boom was caused by a meteorite. Some cameras managed to catch a fireball, which is larger than an ordinary meteor, flying over the scenic Utah sky on the same morning.

Saturday’s meteorite passed over Utah after the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, although it’s unclear whether the meteor was part of that event — caused by visible debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle — or whether the two events just align.

The Perseid meteor shower has many colors of shooting stars. There is a reason for that.

Saturday’s boom isn’t the first time a mysterious explosion has caused widespread confusion.

Last September, NBC Washington reported that dozens of people called 911 after hearing a mysterious loud bang in the Shenandoah Valley. It wasn’t clear at first what could have caused the thunderous thunderbolts on the ground.

According to local reports, meteorologists in the area used lightning-tracking satellite technology to confirm that the surge was most likely caused by a meteor. A handful of observations, including from a pilot who spotted the meteor tracking relatively low in the atmosphere, also helped NASA astronomers confirm that the accident was an explosive meteor.

Some Reddit users researching Saturday’s noise suggested that the meteor’s passage may have been predicted decades ago.

On August 10, 1972, a meteor known as the “Great Daylight Fireball” entered the atmosphere over Utah and traveled hundreds of miles to Canada before re-entering space. Stunning images of the fireball show it shining over the Grand Tetons.

#GreatDaylightFireball entered Earth’s atmosphere at a very shallow angle and didn’t lose enough energy to be captured by Earth’s gravity and fall to Earth. Steroids are believed to have a diameter of about 10 metres. He has not been seen since.

©️ James Baker, 1972, Wyoming pic.twitter.com/2FXLFLwurG

– ESA Operations (ESAoperations) August 10, 2022

Some astronomers have assumed that the asteroid that caused the fireball was over a period of about 25 years, which means it will pass through the region in 1997 and again in 2022, according to predictions from Czech astronomer Zdenek Siblica.

Scientists expressed doubts about such an appearance in 2022, and nothing noticeable was noticed in 1997.

“I think it’s not likely that it’s the same thing, but it’s fun to think about the possibility,” Mark Boslog, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in an email.

Boslough wrote that scientists should be able to plot a trajectory for Saturday’s fireball to determine if the events are related.

“I wouldn’t expect it to match the post-1972 orbit of a fireball in great daylight, but it would be a pretty cool event if it did,” he said. “Even in this case, there would be no reason to expect it to enter the atmosphere above Utah again, because the Earth’s rotation is out of sync with its orbit or the orbit of any asteroid. Coincidences happen.”

Jason Samino contributed to this report.

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