* Astronomy

Southern Louisiana residents spotted a bright green flash in the sky on Thursday night. It was likely to have been a meteor that did not survived to reach the ground.

Reports from Baton Rouge in the east to Jefferson Davis Parish in the west were called in to news outlets about a greenish light seen in the skies around 8:30 p.m (local time).
Randy Belleau, 24, of Lawtell in St. Landry Parish said Friday that he believes a meteor hit in his neighbour's field across the road from his home, though he neither heard nor felt an impact and wasn’t able to find anything in a Friday morning search.
He said he looked outside the door of his home at about 8:30 p.m. Thursday and saw a greenish streak of light lasting “a split-second” that appeared to pass behind the oak trees in his front yard.

"It was big green flash and the end of it was wrapped up in flames" - Randy Belleau.

Sheriffs’ offices in the Acadiana area said they had not received calls about an impact Thursday night or Friday morning.
St. Landry Parish Chief Deputy Laura Balthazar said the only thing she’d heard about the green flash was a report on television news.
NASA spokeswoman Erica Hupp in Washington, D.C., said Friday that a contingent of that agency’s staff makes it their business to know if anything big enough to actually touch the ground is heading toward Earth. She said NASA didn’t have any indication of something big enough to hit the ground going through Earth’s atmosphere in the Louisiana area Thursday night.

"We would know it. They do watch that stuff, because we do watch our satellites" - Erica Hupp.

She said NASA keeps tabs on meteorites because scientists are interested in studying anything from outer space that survives the trip to Earth.
Hupp said that because meteors burn so brightly, observers on the ground may be hundreds of miles from where the meteor they see is passing through the atmosphere.

A NASA information page notes that meteors have to be of a certain size, neither too big nor too small, to actually make landfall and leave anything recognizable behind.
If they’re too small, they burn up, and if they’re too big, they explode and the pieces burn up.

Adapted from Source