Meteorite causes loud rumble heard in Massachusetts
According to NASA, the object fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles over the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The energy released during the disintegration was equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which explains the noise heard in the region.
Press center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
A meteor traveling about 120,000 miles per hour disintegrated Saturday over New England, causing a loud rumble that alarmed residents of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and other areas in the Northeast.
According to NASA, quoted by The New York Times, the object fragmented about 40 miles high over the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. The energy released during the disintegration was equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which explains the noise heard in the region.
">#MeteorSighting: Eyewitnesses in New England and @NOAA’s GOES-19 satellite reported a bright fireball on Saturday, May 30, at 2:06 p.m EDT accompanied by a loud noise. The meteor appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles over northeast MA and southeast NH. The energy…
— NASA Space Alerts (@NASASpaceAlerts) May 30, 2026
Before the official explanation was known, many residents took to social media to speculate about the origin of the noise, which shook windows and homes in different parts of the Boston area.
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The episode occurred just two days after another similar phenomenon was recorded in South Carolina. According to The New York Times, hundreds of people reported hearing a loud rumble coming from the sky on Thursday afternoon. However, NASA later indicated that this case was not caused by a meteorite, although it did not rule out other possibilities, such as falling space debris or satellites.
Carl W. Hergenrother, executive director of the American Meteor Society, explained to the newspaper that such encounters between small asteroids and Earth occur about half a dozen times a year in the continental United States. According to the specialist, reports of Saturday's phenomenon ranged from Quebec to Maryland.
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