Fireball meteor lights up Pacific Northwest sky as 'fireball season' peaks

Before dawn on a Wednesday in late April, the skies above Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia were briefly illuminated by a fireball — a meteor brilliant enough to arrest the attention of anyone awake to witness it. The event was not random chaos but part of a recurring seasonal pattern, as Earth's orbit carries it through ancient debris fields left by long-fractured comets. In this way, a fleeting streak of light becomes a reminder that our planet is not a fixed island but a traveler, moving through a solar system still rich with the remnants of its own formation.