TOKYO: A bolide, or a very bright meteor, was spotted in the sky over the Kanto region of eastern Japan around 2:30 a.m. Thursday (5:30 p.m. Wednesday GMT).

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department received many emergency phone calls from residents reporting that they heard an explosive sound around the time, while a number of comments were posted on social media, including one saying that “windows were shaken.”

Daichi Fujii, a curator at the Hiratsuka City Museum in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, who filmed the fireball, said that the flying object traveled from west to east and was brighter than the full moon.

The reported explosive sound is believed to have been created by a shock wave, Fujii said, adding that the fireball “was likely to be a fragment of a very large shooting star and may have made it to Earth’s surface and become a meteorite.”

先ほど、2020年7月2日、02:32、東京上空に非常に大きな火球（おそらく明るい流星）が西から東へ流れました。数分後に室内でも聞こえる轟音が聞こえましたが関係があるかもしれません。映像は実際のスピードで再生されます。ベランダからの撮影です。 pic.twitter.com/eCYqr8uUfV

— KAGAYA (@KAGAYA_11949) July 1, 2020

According to an official of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a bolide shines very brightly if it is big or travels fast. It is rare for a sound from a bolide to be heard, the official said.

JIJI Press