Earlier this month, a massive fireball crashed into the Atlantic and went unseen by many, according to the Daily Mail. On the afternoon of Feb. 6, a meteor exploded approximately 621 miles (1,000 km) off the coast of Brazil, releasing an energy equivalent of 13,000 tons of TNT, which is roughly the amount of energy used in the atomic weapon that decimated Hiroshima in 1945.
The fireball, which measured 18 meters across and pierced through Earth's atmosphere at 41,600 miles per hour, landed in a local lake called Chebarkul and marks that largest event of its kinds since the February 2013 fireball that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring more than 1,600 people.
One reason that the event went unnoticed, aside from the lack of injuries, was the relatively small impact - the Chelyabinsk fireball had 500,000 tons of TNT energy, approximately 40 times that of the latest impact, as astronomer Phil Plait wrote in his his blog.
"As impacts go, this was pretty small," Plait said. "After all, you didn't even hear about until weeks after it occurred."
NASA has released public data on the fireball, although it is still too early to draw any conclusions regarding the scale of the meteor with what is currently known, RT reports.
According to NASA, when the process of meteor disintegration proceeds too quickly, the end result is what many people would dub an "explosion," although in reality what they are witnessing is simply the conversion of kinetic energy into light and heat.
"The increase in surface area means more heating and glowing, then those pieces break up and get smaller, and you get a runaway cascade," said a NASA researcher.
In an isolated incident, an Indian man was killed by a fireball's debris earlier this month on the campus of a private engineering college in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
