Most Powerful Fireballs Detected in 2025

What this chart shows: the 15 most energetic fireballs of 2025 in NASA's fireball database, ranked by estimated impact energy in kilotons of TNT. Each event is labelled by its date and the latitude and longitude of its peak brightness. The database lists 33 fireballs for the year.

How the data is collected: the events are detected by U.S. Government sensors and published by NASA JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. For each one CNEOS gives the time, location, altitude and velocity at peak brightness, the total radiated energy, and an estimated total impact energy. The impact energy is calculated from the optical energy using an empirical formula published by Peter Brown and colleagues in Nature in 2002; one kiloton equals 4.185 × 10¹² joules.

Background: CNEOS defines a fireball as an unusually bright meteor that reaches visual magnitude −3 or brighter, and says fireballs that explode in the atmosphere are technically called bolides. Meteoroids are generally asteroid or comet fragments between ten microns and about a metre in size, and objects causing fireballs can exceed one metre. CNEOS notes that they are usually not large enough to survive passage through the atmosphere intact, although fragments are sometimes recovered on the ground as meteorites.

Limits: NASA states that the database is not a complete list of fireball events; only the brightest are noted. Energies are approximate, and a few events lack velocity or altitude data. The coordinates show where the fireball was brightest, not where any fragments landed.