7 days ago
‘Quite exciting': Meteor flash across Victoria's sky sparks hunt for space rocks
'I normally go for a walk down that way every day anyway so it was nothing out of the ordinary. I'm a keen birder so it just meant looking down instead of looking up.'
Saskia Reus-Smit, who lives in Fryerstown about 15 minutes from Castlemaine, was stargazing about 7.30pm on Sunday when she realised there was a strong wash of light coming from behind her – much too big to be car headlights, which her neighbours hardly see anyway.
'There are no streetlights or shops or anything [here], so the night sky is always very dark – it's a star watcher's dream,' Reus-Smit said.
'I stepped out of the carport, three steps, and turned my head just as this meteor flew overhead.
'I do a lot of stargazing, although I'm no expert. This was amazing. It was huge. If you think about four full moons joined together. Think about that in your sky above your head, lower than an aircraft.'
Reus-Smit said she could see the meteor's shape, which she described as like a 'giant piece of volcanic porous rock', with red and orange burning craters at its centre and black formations.
'It passed across, and went over the hill,' she said. 'It would have been a time delay of less than a minute.
'This to me sounded more like a massive boom combined with impact.'
Associate professor Michael Brown from Monash University's school of physics and astronomy said the loud noise heard by those nearby was likely a sonic boom.
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'That is unusual and actually quite exciting … if those reports are accurate, probably what they were hearing was a sonic boom from the meteor,' Brown said on Sunday night.
'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. And that possibly means there's chunks of the meteorite actually made it down to the ground and, optimistically, might be found.
'They're not dangerous ... there's a lot of rocks out there in rural Victoria, so trying to identify a meteor amongst them can be pretty tricky.'
Brown recalled a Canadian family's house camera capturing a meteorite landing near the front door last year. It was the first time such an event was caught on camera.
'If you have a look at that video, it's not exactly an asteroid disaster movie, it's much more of a curiosity,' Brown said.
The Perseid meteor shower is expected to peak on Wednesday and Thursday, so astronomers were expecting to see activity in Australian skies.
But astronomer Perry Vlahos told this masthead that Sunday night's sighting was not part of any meteor shower such as the Perseids or Alpha Capricornids.
'This would be what's called a 'sporadic meteor', which refers to all meteors we see with a non-specific origin,' Vlahos said.
'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.
'In order for it to be one, it would have to be travelling upward from horizon to zenith ... which is not what was observed.'
