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”.
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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.
The meteor was also captured by the Pendergast Hut cam on Mt Buller, at 7.40pm.
Astrophysicist and astronomer Prof Jonti Horner, from the University of Southern Queensland, confirmed it was a meteor that had lit up the sky.
“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 was not surprising, as meteorites are hard to find.
“You pretty much need to be an expert to know what you’re seeing is actually what you’re hoping to see,” he said.
“If you can get footage from multiple angles and locations then you can triangulate a path through the atmosphere to work out how quickly [the meteor] was moving, what direction it was moving, and therefore where any fragments could have landed.”
Horner said the Australian Desert Fireball Network, operated out of Curtin University, has a network of cameras to capture events like this.
He estimated Australia would experience a meteor event like what occurred on Sunday night between five to ten times each year.
