Stars seem to have been shooting across the heavens far more than usual lately.
In March, fireball after fireball coursed through the skies of North America and Europe. Some of the dazzling apparitions dropped meteorites in their wake. In Ohio in the US, space shards set down in fields and forests. Other rocky visitors smashed through the roofs of people’s homes and ricocheted around their bedrooms.
“It’s a shooting gallery,” said Mike Hankey, an amateur astronomer at the American Meteor Society. “There’s stuff flying all over the place.”
The number of fireballs over the first three months of 2026 was double what is usually reported to the society in the first quarter of other years.
“It does seem unusual, right?” said Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environments Office at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, US.
Is something peculiar happening in space? Are there more fireballs screaming through the atmosphere than usual? And if so, why?
Space agencies, including Nasa, aim to be aware of any sizable asteroids that may strike our planet and cause harm. They use satellites, telescopes, cameras and other government sensors to spot smaller, innocuous asteroids that explode into fireballs. The nonprofit American Meteor Society also runs a reporting system that since 2005 has relied on the public to record observations. If you or your cameras have spied a fireball, they want to hear about it.
In January and February, the society registered a gradual but notable uptick in reported fireballs. In March, that uptick became a spike. In total, during those three months, there were 40 fireballs seen by 50 or more people, twice the January-to-March average of 20 (an average calculated using data from 2021 to 2025).
Of those 40, 33 unleashed thunderclap-like sonic booms, suggesting the space rocks responsible were on the larger side. The meteor that exploded over Ohio on March 17 did so with the force of 370 tonnes of TNT.
This sort of fireball activity can sometimes be attributed to a major meteor shower. These showers are the result of Earth flying through the debris trail left in the wake of a comet or sometimes, an asteroid.
But none was scheduled during the fireball spike. The first quarter of the year is relatively lacking in known major meteor showers.
In response to growing public interest, a Nasa public affairs official said in a blog post at the end of March, “While it may seem like meteor reports and sightings have been more frequent recently, it is not out of the ordinary.” The post explained that from February to April, there is often a 10 per cent to 30 per cent increase in the number of extremely luminous meteors — and nobody is quite sure why.
Hankey said that this increase was already baked into the American Meteor Society tally, and that it doesn’t explain the apparent doubling of fireball sightings in the year’s first quarter.
“I’ve done the best job I can do to make sense out of this,” said Hankey, who is not formally trained in astronomy or statistics.
If the meteor society’s tally is correct, could the fireballs have been coming from an undiscovered meteor shower?
Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, said there were reasons to doubt this explanation. With one exception — the Taurids, which appear in the fall — meteor showers don’t generally involve the sort of large space rocks that create radiant and long-lived fireballs like those seen this past March.
“If these were part of some sort of coherent stream, from a single source, you would expect them to have very similar directions of arrival from the sky,” said Brown, referring to March’s fireballs. “That would suggest a common origin. But these don’t.”
Which leads to another potential explanation.
“There’s a lot more attention on the sky,” said Cooke of Nasa.
Over the past decade, there has been major growth in the number of cameras out in the world, from those on smartphones to autonomous shutters on doorbells and dashboards. When several fireballs make headlines, it turns plenty of people into meteor-curious skywatchers.
Perhaps more fireballs are being observed simply because “people’s focus is heightened”, Brown said. The number of fireballs actually falling from the sky, both seen and unseen, could be normal.
Althea Moorhead, who works in Cooke’s Nasa office, described a statistical analysis on the fireball data that she had conducted; this analysis has not been subjected to peer review. Moorhead took the reported fireball numbers for the January-to-March periods dating to 2011, made a dot on a chart for each year, and drew a trend line through the dots.
It suggested that for certain years, the averages expected based on the trend line were higher than the actual averages based on reported numbers. This was particularly true for the first three months of 2022 and 2025, when the reported number of fireballs was appreciably lower than the expected average. The number of fireballs seen this year may seem to be far higher than the average. But in reality, it is much closer to the expected average.
Astronomers, professional and amateur alike, are still debating March’s meteor madness — but nobody thinks anything particularly odd was happening. “It’s most likely just the natural ebb and flow of debris in the solar system, which is incredibly complex and incredibly random,” Hankey said.
Sometimes, Earth randomly receives a delivery of extra meteors. In March, thousands of lucky people happened to get front-row seats to the cosmic fireworks.