The sky flashed for a fraction of a second northeast of Heather Argyle’s home in Mount Vernon on Tuesday night.
A security camera affixed to her home caught the flash.
Dozens of people across Western Washington and British Columbia reported a bright streak across the sky a little after 9 p.m. Most called it a “fireball.”
And a “fireball” it was, said Robert Lunsford, field report coordinator for the American Meteor Society, where people can log meteor sightings online. Eighteen people reported this one.
“We know it was a natural fireball made of stone or metal or a combination of both,” Lunsford said. “The duration was too fast to be human-made space debris.”
The fireball was “almost undoubtedly a meteor,” said University of Washington professor Chris Laws, who specializes in astronomy.
The meteor was likely a rock a few inches in diameter that blasted into Earth’s atmosphere at “comically high speeds” of over 200,000 mph, Laws said.
At that speed, the chunk superheats the air around it into a glowing plasma, which creates that fireball visual, before breaking apart into dust and tiny fragments, he said.
Fireballs are spectacular to see, but they’re not exactly uncommon. Seattle saw one in August and B.C. in December 2024, Laws said. Three have been recorded in 2026 across the world, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
An average fireball is only the size of a pea, Lunsford said. And while that can create a visual, a big one the size of a softball can make a flash as bright as the full moon.
“Stay tuned, though,” Laws said. “Our ability to spot these rocks before they enter the Earth's atmosphere is getting better and better … I would fully expect that over the next decade or so we'll get notice of one of these things happening here in Seattle in advance.”
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