Fragments of meteorite may be sitting at bottom of Cape Cod Bay

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00][music] >> It's the boom heard up and down the East Coast. NASA says it was a meteor and fragments of it might be sitting at the bottom of Cape Cod Bay. New at 6:00, WBZ's Mike Sullivan talked with a Harvard scientist about the magnitude of this event and the chances that someone will find what's left behind.

[00:00:24]>> The Big Bang may have started the universe, but the big boom that started a viral tsunami. Meteor landing in the Cape Cod Bay causing a sonic boom.

[00:00:36]The noise shaking homes and scaring pups across multiple states.

[00:00:41]>> It was moving at a hundred times the speed of sound when it exploded as a result of friction on air.

[00:00:46]>> Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist and theorist at Harvard. He says the meteor exploded at an altitude approaching 40 miles up in the air. NASA says it was 5 ft in diameter, was traveling 42,000 miles per hour.

[00:01:00]>> The explosion released 300 tons of TNT equivalent amount of energy, which amounts to 2% of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy.

[00:01:13]>> Believe it or not, meteorite landings are common, but the odds being struck by a fragment on land are slim.

[00:01:19]>> Such explosions happen every couple of weeks on the entire Earth. Most of Earth, 71% is covered with oceans, so we don't hear about it.

[00:01:30]>> Unless you're the Dolans in Gloucester.

[00:01:33]>> Around 1:30, 2:00 in the afternoon, we just heard this bam, this this pow.

[00:01:38]>> They spoke to us last year when an object struck the side of their home shattering into pieces. The rocky material smelled of sulfur.

[00:01:45]>> I'm picking them up and I'm looking around and I'm like, there's nobody here.

[00:01:50]>> A geophysicist told WBZ that it's a meteorite. They too heard this weekend's sonic boom noise, but they say it was nothing like the boom for the meteorite that struck their home. They are still looking for a university or organization to analyze it. There may also be more people looking to get their hands on this weekend's meteor that landed in the bay.

[00:02:09]>> What if you wanted to find a piece of that meteor using a magnet? You could drop it off a boat or a pier or off the beach into the Cape Cod Bay, but you're going to have to get really lucky.

[00:02:20]>> Loeb searched in the Pacific for the remains of an interstellar meteor.

[00:02:24]>> This orange path, the most likely path.

[00:02:28]>> It took a team of scientists two weeks using a sled of magnets to come up with these metallic spherules from the meteor.

[00:02:35]>> It needs to be quite an extensive operation. However, one can be lucky. It's just like a fishing expedition.

[00:02:42]>> Here's to happy hunting.

[00:02:44]In Boston, I'm Mike Sullivan, WBZ News.

[00:02:47]>> And you know people are going to be out there looking for it.

[00:02:50]>> still like the most amazing thing I've heard in a long time. I just want to get a little clarification here, Eric. So, >> when it comes through the atmosphere, it's a meteor. It becomes a meteorite when?

[00:02:59]>> When it hits the surface. So, if some >> Got you.

[00:03:01]>> makes it to ground level, now it's a meteorite. If you you can pick it up, you've got a meteorite. Everything in the air is a meteor. It's kind of crazy cuz you think about these things and usually if you have say a meteor shower and you're looking up and you're seeing these streaks of light and you're thinking, man, how big are these things streaking through our atmosphere?

[00:03:17]They're usually the size of a grain of sand or a small pebble. I mean, tiny, tiny things that burn up. And a question I got a lot over the weekend is, oh, don't we track these things? Yeah, planet-killer ones possibly, really big asteroids. The vast majority never make it to the ground. Even this one that was about 5 ft across probably completely burned up except for maybe a couple small shards that are at the bottom of Cape Cod Bay right now. So, it turns of what might be left behind, probably not a lot, but I'll be really curious to see if anyone would get down there and find a piece of this one. It was definitely the talk of the town.