Meteorite seen over Sydney
A suspicious meteor was captured flashing across Sydney skies on Thursday night, shocking viewers who watched the unexpected cosmic spectacle from their cars and porches.
At around 18.30, the meteor was seen to explode almost like a fireball. Camera footage from various cars in the city shows the meteorite hurtling through the air, then bursting into flames and burning in a sudden orange explosion.
It is not clear where the meteorite fell, its size and speed. Eyewitnesses posting on social media claimed that the meteorite was seen from the South Coast, Dubbo and Bathurst, among other areas.
Brad Tucker, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, saw the meteorite coming from Canberra and said he estimated the size of this masthead to be between 30 and 50 centimeters. [it] “They put on quite a show.”
“It was a good-sized thing,” Tucker said. “We’re trying to expand a network to track them… all the way to the east coast.”
The suspected meteorite had not yet been officially confirmed as of 8pm on Thursday. The Desert Fireball Network, a research group run by Curtin University tasked with studying meteors, fireballs and their pre-Earth orbits, is working to determine the nature of the suspected meteorite.
Meteors occur when rocks from space enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burn; these are often called shooting stars. When a meteoroid, a rock still in space, survives its journey through Earth’s atmosphere and hits the ground, it is called a meteor.
Tucker estimated that an object similar to the one observed on Thursday flies over Australia “every few weeks”; But most shooting stars are tiny dust grains about the size of a grain of sand.
According to Tucker, approximately 200 tons of space rock hits Earth every day. He suggested that the green color of the meteorite seen in the dashcam footage showed that the rock might be made of iron and nickel.
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Daniel Lo Surdo is a breaking news reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. He previously ran The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s national news live blog.Connect via email.
