Last night, residents of South Florida on the Atlantic coast got a thrill, and probably a quick scare across the skies above them (per NPR):

WOAH! Big flash and streak across sky in West Palm Beach. Happened moments ago while we were on Facebook Live for a @CBS12 story.

Working to figure out what it was. pic.twitter.com/VDl9pFtb3h

— Jay O'Brien (@jayobtv) April 13, 2021

And from another angle:

@CoralTap Just saw this in the sky from Parkland at 10:16PM. #Meteor pic.twitter.com/E1rqXUbku8

— m (@cbkcc1) April 13, 2021

Scrolling around the InterWebs this morning, I couldn’t get any confirmation the object was the projected asteroid scheuled to pass earth last night — from EarthSky on Sunday:

A recently detected space rock will pass by our planet on Monday, April 12, 2021. It’ll come extremely close, far closer than geostationary satellites orbiting some 22,000 miles (35,786 km) above Earth.
The small asteroid has been designated as 2021 GW4.
It is estimated to be about 16 feet (5 meters) in diameter. It’s a small space rock, and there’s no risk of impact, astronomers say.
NASA/JPL calculations indicate asteroid 2021 GW4 will pass at just 12,313 miles (19,816 km) from Earth’s surface, which is about 5-percent the Earth-moon distance.

The space rock is traveling at 18,706 miles per hour (30,104 km/h) or 8.36 kilometers per second, relative to Earth.
The closest approach of asteroid 2021 GW4 will occur at about 13:00 UTC (during the day for the east coast of North America; translate UTC to your time) on Monday, April 12.

The space rock will not be visible to the unaided eye, but should be within the reach of telescopes with cameras.

In fact, GW4 is a recent find, just discovered April 8 at the Catalina Sky Survey at Mt. Lemmon, Arizona. So quick and gone again. Or exploded?
According to The Washington Post this morning, the sight last night wasn’t GW4:

Residents from the Bahamas to Jacksonville witnessed the fireball, which streaked across the skies around 10:18 p.m.
A fireball is defined as a very bright meteor that streaks across the sky.

The American Meteor Society, which documents fireball reports and calculates the path of suspected meteors, believes the space rock traveled south to north about midway between the Atlantic coast of Florida and the western tip of Grand Bahama Island.
…
While residents in Florida did not report any sound associated with the meteor, a sonic boom was heard on Grand Bahama Island, accompanied by some shaking.
Meteors enter the Earth’s outer atmosphere traveling anywhere from 25,000 to 160,000 mph, slowing down rapidly as they encounter friction from air drag.
That friction generates enormous amounts of heat, causing the meteor to ablate, or burn up and glow.

For shooting stars, whose instigating objects are hardly the size of a pebble or a grain of puffed rice, the debris burns up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere long before approaching the surface.
Once in a while, however, a much larger object, known as a bolide, will penetrate deeper into the atmosphere.

On rare occasions, a sufficiently large meteor can remain intact as it travels into the lower atmosphere, its speed giving rise to a sonic boom before the meteor either hits the ground or explodes.
Usually frictional heating places enough stress on the meteor that it explodes before hitting the ground, yielding a spattering of much smaller, slower-moving fragments.
Video suggests that was the case in Florida on Monday night.
…
In the case of Monday night’s meteor, Doppler radars located in Miami and Melbourne, Fla., did not indicate debris. That may mean the main meteor remained intact long enough to make it below the radars’ lowest scan angles.
Weather radars are better at spotting numerous small objects than one medium-sized one.
That’s one of the reasons airplanes don’t show up on most conventional S-band weather radars.

Initial speculation had arisen that the Florida fireball could have been linked to a near-Earth asteroid known as GW4 that was slated to pass about 16,000 miles away from Earth.
However, the fireball was entirely unrelated.

Whoa! Maybe later today we’ll get a true verification of GW4 and the ‘fireball’ last night.
Impact of fiction — oh,Téa Leoni:

GW4 — Not!

(Illustration: ‘Meteor,’ found here).