Arizona meteor: First videos show stunning flash across night skies (VIDEOS)

A meteor flared across the sky over Phoenix, Arizona Thursday morning, reportedly waking many residents from their slumber with the sound of a loud bang as it passed.

Locals took to social media to question what the noise was, as others confirmed it was a meteor streaking through the sky.

The first videos and photos of the meteor streak show a dramatic bright flare as the space rock fizzles overhead.

Photos of the trail of swirling smoke left behind have also been shared across social media.

Arizona, famously, is already home to a massive meteor crater.

An iron asteroid, some 98-164ft (30-50 meters) in diameter, impacted the Colorado Plateau in northern Arizona an estimated 50,000 years ago, resulting in an enormous crater nearly a mile (1.6km) wide and 570ft (174 meters) deep.

The US Geological Survey says the impact “exploded with the force of over 2 million tons of TNT” - about 150 times the power of the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.