Fireball meteor believed to have crashed into Georgia home after sending shockwaves across Southeast

ATLANTA – Damage was reported at a home in Georgia after a bright fireball meteor shot across the Southeast sky Thursday afternoon, startling anyone who heard or felt it, according to hundreds of social media posts and fireball reports submitted to astronomy organizations.

Between noon and 12:30 p.m. ET more than 140 reports of a fireball were submitted to the American Meteor Society website from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.

"This was the middle of the day, and it just came out of nowhere," one fireball report on the American Meteor Society read from Perry, Georgia. 

Images of damage to a home in Henry County, Georgia, southeast of Atlanta, showed a hole in the roof and ceiling along with rocky material and other debris on the floor inside the home. 

A fireball is a very bright meteor – brighter than magnitude 4 – roughly equivalent to the brilliance of Venus in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a specific type of fireball that culminates in a spectacular explosion of light, often accompanied by visible fragments.

Soon after Thursday's incident, the National Weather Service office in Atlanta was looking into reports of seismic activity. However, the U.S. Geological Survey does not show any earthquake activity in Georgia at the time of the boom.

Photos from South Carolina show the bright orange streak moving across the blue sky. 

Satellite imagery showed a possible smoke trail around noon that stretched from Tennessee into northern Georgia. 

NOAA's GOES East satellite Geostationary Lightning Mapper captured the bright flash of the meteor near the North Carolina-Virginia border. 

If you witnessed the fireball and captured a photo or video, share those at foxweather.com/connect.