Forty kilometres a second: Fireball lights up the sky over Brisbane
It lit up the night sky across south-east Queensland and northern NSW overnight, yet the meteor that caused Monday night's fireball was probably just the size of your fist.
The sky lit up about 7.30pm, as the meteor tore through the atmosphere at an estimated 40 kilometres a second.
University of Southern Queensland astronomer Professor Jonti Horner said while the fireball coincided with the Lyrid meteor shower, it definitely was not part of the annual cosmic occurrence.
How could Horner be so sure? Simply because Australia was facing in the wrong direction to experience the Lyrid shower at the time.
'The dust from those two meteor showers [Lyrid and Halley's Comet-associated Eta Aquariids] was hitting the other side of the planet and wouldn't have been able to reach us,' he said.
Meteor hunters shared dashcam and security camera footage to social media, appearing to show a meteor visible from as far north as Calliope, near Gladstone, and as far south as Sydney.
Some deduced it would have fallen to earth near Emmaville – south of the southern Queensland town of Stanthorpe and north of Tenterfield in NSW.
One person posted that Emmaville was 'abuzz' on Tuesday with people looking for fragments.
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