I have a Birdweather puck (https://birdweather.com) that listens for birds in our backyard in suburban Boston. It also measures sound pressure level (30 second sample rate).

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’m around 8 miles west of Boston. I was playing on the floor with my daughter and had my ear to the ground- suddenly heard all of the windows shaking, the floor rumbled and an explosion louder than I’ve ever heard before.

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.

It's just earlier this week we have an HN front-page news on the sophisticated Rubin telescope [1].

According to its Wikipedia entry, "Rubin is expected to catalog millions of supernovae, more than five million asteroids (including ~100,000 near-Earth objects), and image approximately 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies." [2]

I guess this this reported meteor is the one that got away, or perhaps it's beyond its scope of monitoring the Southern sky. But even if it's monitoring the Northern hemisphere it will most probably going to miss it due to the puny size of the meteor, more like a small tent instead of a skyscrapper.

>The meteor was about five feet wide, according to the space agency, with a mass of 5.6 metric tons (that's about the weight of a large elephant.)

[1] Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids and Failed Supernovas:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352500

[2] Vera C. Rubin Observatory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory

The day was somewhat stormy. I was in my kitchen in my north-suburban-Boston house, when I suddenly heard a BOOM. I thought it was a very large branch falling on my house, so I ran outside to check out the roof. Saw nothing, and only later heard about the meteor.

I was playing Street Fighter 2 as Guile, just did a Sonic Boom against Dhalsim, and then I heard the explosion.

If you're interested in efforts to catalog and even deflect asteroids that might hit Earth:

https://b612.ai/

The ".ai" stands for "Asteroid Institute." It was started by two former astronauts, Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart.

Mentioned (in comments) several times a few days ago:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48354442>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341582>

The last I heard a meteor is a flash of light caused by a meteorite interacting with the atmosphere. Is this distinction, like 'lecturn', now dead?

I didn't hear it in northern RI but all my friends heard it clearly. I feel left out

The devastation we are seeing is unparalleled. Judging from early estimates - millions dead. A state in ruins. The meteor was shot out of orbit by Bug Plasma that derived from Klendathu, the Arachnids home planet. Nothing lives in what was once called the Turkey Paradise. Massachusetts…has been wiped off the Earth. The US Congress met moments ago and voted unanimously for mobilization to destroy the Arachnid threat.

0.00006 times the speed of light. Damn.

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Saturday, May 30, 2026

Apparently it fell into the water. Maybe it can be recovered and made into the second coolest rock exhibit in Massachusetts (first is Plymouth Rock obviously).

From the outer Cape it sounded like a long low rumble. I tought it was the wind making an unusual noise.

I was at a beachhouse north of Boston and I thought someone fell out of bed or dropped something really heavy upstairs. It was loud and the whole house shook. All of us were scouring the internet for like an hour, finding absolutely nothing "official" or any mention of it on news sites- just tons of subreddits and other social media blowing up all over the Northeast wondering what the heck it was.

I'm not saying it was aliens, but...

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Hmm. SpaceX IPO looking like a good buy.

Everyone knew it didn't hit Boston when the boom wasn't followed by the sound of keyboards every government office rushing to get rid of all the rules they never wanted in the first place.

The meteor finally had enough of Massachusetts!

Although, the title is kind of misleading.

> with a mass of 5.6 metric tons (that's about > the weight of a large elephant.)

Elephant-sized meteor sounds scary. Must have been many elephants that extinctified the dinosaur.

"230 tons of TNT"

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.

Reporter: "Now, a day later, we're learning more from NASA."

NASA: "Yep, that's a rock!"

so what..?

[flagged]

Probably just a UFO pickup gone bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSY4fEEg4j0

PSA: meteors have nothing to do with explosions. The shockwave comes from meteor's movement alone, the parts never move apart with any speed comparable to their common forward motion.

A breakup will increase surface area and therefore kinetic energy to shockwave transfer efficiency, still not an explosion.