Meteor that flashed above Windsor and Detroit was 'maybe the size of your desk'
The sight of meteors similar to the one that that flashed above Windsor and Detroit Tuesday night is more common than some may think.
"There's sort of ten-ish per year that get hundreds of people reporting that they've seen it," said David Cinabro, the chair of Wayne State University's physics and astronomy department.
"Most of the earth is covered with water. So if you extrapolate [the] 10 people see to how many actually happen, there's probably about a hundred or so per year ... they're not terribly uncommon."
Cinabro said that based on how bright the flash was, astronomers believe the meteor was "maybe the size of your desk."
Desk-sized or not, the meteor certainly alarmed some of the people who witnessed it.
Dallin Grantmyre was working on the Bob-Lo Island ferry when the sky lit up and an explosion was heard in the distance.
"We freaked out. The residents got scared. The captain was driving, he couldn't really tell ... what was going on," Grantmyre said.
"There was a lot of nervous reactions. For me, being on the water and not knowing what's going on — there's not really [many] places I could go — to see the sky lit up that bright, it did scare us."
Cinabro said the meteor was observed by people as far as Indiana and Ohio. While he expects some fragments survived the explosion, it's unlikely they'll be recoverable.
"They're probably quite small," he said. "By the time people are actually able to look and see through the snow ... it'll look like rocks and be really hard to find."
If, against all odds, someone finds a fragment of the meteor, Cinabro recommends contacting a university astronomy or physics department.
"They're remnants from the early solar system," he said. "These are bits that didn't get caught up inside of a planet, and so they're really sort of messengers from what the early solar system looked like."
