Meteor seen over Scotland's skies
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Meteor explodes in fireball and sonic boom over Australia
People in Australia 's Victoria reported a loud sonic boom that rattled houses as a meteor streaked past the night sky on Sunday. Footage of the space rock burning brightly was shared on social media by residents in Ballarat and Bendigo from 7:30pm local time. They reported hearing a loud sonic boom about a minute after the fireball was seen on community Facebook pages. 'A very bright and slow fireball was observed and video recorded over Victoria, August 10, 9:34 UT,' the International Meteor Organisation, a coalition of amateur meteor observers, said in a post on Facebook. 'Bendigo just got hit by a meteor! Felt all over Bendigo! Shook our house. BOOM,' one resident wrote. The Australian government's earthquake monitoring agency said in an X post that it had received multiple reports of tremors around the time the meteor passed by, but ruled out any seismic event. 'Geoscience Australia received multiple felt reports from Bendigo, VIC at around 7:40pm, however no seismic event was observed,' the agency said. Amateur astronomer David Finlay, admin of Australian Meteor Reports, suspected a large chunk of the object likely survived to the ground. 'To be able to hear the sonic boom loudly from the ground suggests that quite a big chunk of the meteor was pretty close to the ground,' associate professor Michael Brown from Monash University's school of physics and astronomy told The Age. 'And that possibly means there's chunks of the meteorite that actually made it down to the ground and optimistically, might be found.' Experts ruled out the possibility of the fireball being space junk, finding it was most likely a meteor whose fragments might have landed somewhere between Bendigo and Ballarat. 'A manual reduction on the fireball over Victoria at 9:34 UT indicates a fall site to the northeast of Maryborough, with a final visual height of 9 km, so almost definitely a meteorite fall,' the Ballarat municipality observatory said. 'There were numerous reports of sound, adding confidence that this is a dropper. This maybe refined if further good quality data becomes available.' The fireball's sighting coincided with the Perseids meteor shower, anticipated to be the best of the year, producing a dazzling display of shooting stars. 'With swift and bright meteors, Perseids frequently leave long 'wakes' of light and colour behind them as they streak through the Earth's atmosphere,' Nasa's Monika Luabeya noted in a blog post. However, experts ruled out the possibility of the Victoria fireball being part of any meteor shower such as the Perseids or Alpha Capricornids. 'The reason it's not a Perseid is because the 'radiant' – the point the meteors appear to radiate out from – never rises above the horizon for us at the latitude of Victoria,' astronomer Perry Vlahos told The Age.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Meteor captured on CCTV in south-west Victoria
Many Victorians reported seeing a large light streak across the night sky on Sunday evening. A clip provided by Dwayne Rollings shared footage with Guardian Australia from his property in Cobden, in south-western Victoria. Taken just after 7.30pm on Sunday, it shows a large fireball streaming over a paddock before disappearing in the distance. Prof Andy Tomkins, who works at Melbourne's Monash University, said the phenomenon appears to be a meteor and it was likely there is at least one meteorite on the ground. ► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘My house and the earth shook visibly': blazing meteor thrills residents in Central Victoria
Residents in Central Victoria have reported seeing a large meteor streaking across the night sky on Sunday, with some people describing an extremely bright fireball and a loud sound as the object passed overhead. Dozens of clips and witness accounts were shared in the Facebook group Australian Meteor Reports. Saskia Reus-Smit, from Fryerstown, posted to the group that they had seen the meteor pass 'directly over my head, very low, seemed lower than a plane … close enough to see burning definition, like a volcanic rock burning orange, shades of black rock formation shadows clearly visible'. Sign up: AU Breaking News email Soon after, Reus-Smit experienced 'a massive boom, sounded more like impact than sonic boom but could have been either. My house and the earth shook visibly.' Terrence Dale, who lives in Eildon, wrote on Facebook he saw the meteor at 7.35pm. 'Low on the horizon and it was blue and red in colour and was extremely long in shape, it dropped from my view due to mountain range near where we live,' Dale wrote. 'I knew what it was as I've been reading a lot on social media of a meteor shower happening soon, I just happened to be outside on a very clear night and was looking in the right direction.' Dale said he was left awestruck by the display. Astrophysicist and astronomer Prof Jonti Horner, from the University of Southern Queensland, confirmed it was a meteor that had lit up the sky. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'It was definitely a meteor. Because of how bright it was, we describe it as a 'fireball' – which just means a meteor that was brighter in the sky than the planet Venus appears,' Horner said. 'From how bright it was and the fact there was a widely heard sonic boom-rumble a few minutes after it appeared, it seems likely that fragments could have made it to the ground.' He said to his knowledge nothing has been found yet – though this is not surprising, as meteorites are hard to find, he said.
