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Fireball in the Sky Explained by Furman Professor
David Moffett, professor of physics, talked with local TV news stations about the fireball, or meteor, seen during the day on June 26, 2025.
A fireball, or meteor, that streaked across clear blue Southeast skies just after noon on June 26 caught the attention of people from Charlotte to Georgia, including folks in the Upstate of South Carolina. The flash of white light that seemed to soar from east to west and ended in a burst. It was covered by The Washington Post, The Guardian and other national news outlets. In Greenville, South Carolina, TV stations WYFF and Fox Carolina turned to David Moffett, professor of physics at Furman University, for answers.
The fireball, or meteor, seen in the sky just after noon on June 26, 2025, was reported by local and national news outlets. This image is from Fox Carolina.
Moffett was working with students when the meteor occurred, so he didn’t see it. He found out about it when a friend and fellow scientist texted him.
“I thought maybe this was associated with a meteor shower,” Moffett told WYFF. But the earth isn’t currently passing through a meteor debris field, like a comet’s tail. The object that caused the fireball could have been floating around in the solar system for millions of years and “just happened to be hitting earth at just the right time and the right angle, so we see it in the daytime here.”
In a separate news story, Moffett said the object was probably about the size of a tennis ball and explained that it was likely heavily composed of metals that take longer to burn up in the atmosphere.
Moffett told Fox Carolina that the meteor sighting was rare because it came from the direction of the sun, so no telescopes were going to see it before it entered the atmosphere.
Moffett is regularly sought out by news outlets to explain events happening in space, from eclipses to comets to the Northern Lights, and he’s continuously engaged with Furman students in the classroom, across campus or in the physics department’s research facilities, including Timmons Planetarium and Furman’s off-campus observatory.
UPDATE: After the initial news stories, more information became available, Moffett said. Two large pieces and a couple handfuls of the meteor were found, revealing it was more stony than metallic, and it was probably larger than a tennis ball. Science marches on!