Extremely rare, meteor explosion ten times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
A massive meteor explosion, releasing ten times the energy of the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, occurred in December 2018, but went unnoticed.
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According to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the explosion occurred at 11:15 a.m. on December 18, 2018, over the Bering Sea, between Russia and Alaska.
NASA believes this is the second largest meteor explosion in the last 30 years, and the largest since the famous Chelyabinsky meteor explosion in 2013, the Daily Mail reports.
Meteorite explosions are normal, but events as large as this one are very rare. An explosion of this magnitude only occurs a few times in a century.
The meteor was approximately 10 meters wide, weighed over 1,500 tons, and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT.
Peter Brown of Western Ontario University, Canada, discovered the explosion and announced it on Twitter.