As Earth orbits the sun, it runs into a lot of debris. Small pieces burn up in the upper atmosphere - we call these shooting stars, or meteors. A bigger piece might last longer and burn brighter - a fireball. It might even explode! Exploding fireballs are bolides, or airbursts - they explode above the ground and release energy like a bomb...
Play with the sliders to see how likely these different things are:
| Earth | Populated | Urban | You |
| Audible | Chelyabinsk | Tunguska |
About 18,250 fireballs will be so powerful they can be heard from some place on earth in the next year.
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What would happen?
Most fireballs occur over ocean or unpopulated areas. If a meteor falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it...
Audible fireballs
Fireballs are actually very common - thousands of meteors bright enough to be considered fireballs hit Earth every day. Some start cracking into pieces under the pressure, which just causes more pressure, and more cracks, until they explode! If this happens, you might even be able to hear it - about 50 meteors this big hit every day. NASA reported 76 airbursts that exploded with the force of at least 200 pounds of TNT since 2009. Almost all of these explosions are small enough and high enough, though, that nothing on the ground would have been damaged.1,2,3,4