A blazing meteor lit up the skies over central Victoria on Sunday night, with stunned residents from Ballarat to Melbourne describing the flash as “beautiful”, “sparkly” and “as fat as anything”.
The fireball appeared just after 8pm, streaking east to west before exploding in a bright flash. Some witnesses reported hearing a loud bang and even feeling the ground shake.
On Reddit, users shared their sightings. One Ballarat resident described a “huge bright flash speeding directly downwards — I thought it was a local firework fail!”. Another described the meteor as a “shimmering orange, golden, silver with a sparkly tail — fat as anything!”
A user in the Melbourne suburb Reservoir, about 150km from Bendigo, wrote: “No sounds, but I did catch what looked like a shooting star! I always sky watched, so used to seeing satellites … but almost like a meteor with a tail.”
Sonic booms
Associate professor Michael Brown from Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy confirmed it was “very much a meteor, not a piece of space junk”.
“It was coming in too fast and burned up far too quickly than space junk,” he told ABC Radio.
If the reports of a sonic boom are accurate, Brown said it could mean that parts of the meteor survived the descent.
“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 are chunks of the meteorite that actually made it down to the ground — and optimistically, might be found.”
A sonic boom is generated when an object surpasses the speed of sound as it moves through the air, resulting in a shockwave. With meteors, this phenomenon is audible over long distances, which implies that the location of the impact might be quite distant from where the boom is perceived.
Where has the meteorite landed?
The presence of a sonic boom suggests that parts of the meteor made it down to Earth, but the location of these fragments is still uncertain.
Even more, just because the noise was heard in Bendigo or Ballarat, that doesn’t necessarily mean the meteorite landed there.
“It could be quite some distance away,” Brown said. “You never know — it could have put a hole in someone’s shed. But it’s not exactly a Hollywood disaster movie.”
Andy Tomkins, a professor of Earth and planetary science at Monash University, said researchers were trying to locate any potential fall.
“That was a large meteor that likely ended up with at least one meteorite on the ground,” he told The Guardian. “We’re trying to find enough footage today to triangulate the location.”
Finding a meteorite doesn’t happen too often.
At least 17 meteorites are known to have fallen in Victoria. The most recent meteorite discovery in the state was in 2015, when a 17kg stone was discovered using a metal detector at Maryborough — a town in the Victorian Goldfields region, about 50km north of Ballarat.
The meteorite was kept in a shed for several years before being handed over to the Melbourne Museum, where it was identified to be about 4.6 billion years old.
