Yes, that was a meteor flying over Cincinnati and Kentucky on Thursday

Many people in the Greater Cincinnati region saw a bright object fly across the sky Thursday evening.

A Reddit user said concertgoers watching Green Day at Great American Ball Park witnessed a "giant fireball fly across the sky," which they said made many people gasp. Other reports from the area flooded in to the American Meteor Society , including some in Groesbeck, Loveland and even throughout the Dayton area. Many people reported to have seen the object around 9:44 p.m.

Wes Ryle, astronomer for the Cincinnati Observatory , confirmed people did, in fact, see a meteor Thursday.

"It's usually referred to as a fireball, which is just an extremely bright meteor," Ryle told The Enquirer. "And, of course, meteors are when a small object, basically a piece of rocky material, encounters the earth's atmosphere, and when it's traveling at really, really, really high speeds, that causes it to heat up the air around it and glow as it comes down through the atmosphere. In this case, it even looks like it broke up a little bit as it came down, which resulted in a flashing appearance as it came down through the atmosphere."

The video below was captured from Burbank, Ohio.

Ryle said the meteor flashed in the sky for only a few seconds and appeared to be blue and green. Most reports came from Ohio and Kentucky, but there were some even from Georgia, North Carolina and Missouri.

As of 9 a.m. Friday, the American Meteor Society had received 177 eyewitness reports, and the path of the meteor appeared to be over central Kentucky near Lebanon.

Ryle says scientists will be able to estimate the size of the object based on video, but even bright fireballs are typically small in size, similar to a basketball.

"They are actually fairly common," Ryle said. "I don't know an exact number off the top of my head, but I know that just from me looking at space-related websites and things like that, you typically see a report of a fireball in some location maybe once a month. It depends whether it happens over a populated area and, of course, what time it happens."

Thursday's meteor flying across highly-populated areas, such as Cincinnati, early in the evening led to the large number of sightings.

"They're happening pretty frequently, but whether they're actually witnessed by a lot of people, that's more of a tossup."

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Yes, that was a meteor flying over Cincinnati and Kentucky on Thursday