Meteorite seen over Sydney
A suspected meteor has been captured shining above the Sydney skyline on Thursday night, shocking onlookers who watched the unexpected cosmic show unfold from their vehicles and verandahs.
The meteor was seen almost exploding like a fireball at about 6.30pm. Dashcam footage from several cars across the city shows the meteorite hurtling through the air, before burning up and combusting in a sudden orange explosion.
It’s unclear where the meteorite landed and its size and speed. Witnesses posting to social media claimed the meteorite was seen from the South Coast, Dubbo and Bathurst, among other areas.
Australian National University Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Brad Tucker saw the meteorite from Canberra, telling this masthead he estimated it to be 30 to 50 centimetres in size, which he said, “may not seem big, but they are super dense so [it] put on quite the show”.
“It was a good-sized one,” Tucker said. “We are trying to extend a network … out to the east coast to … track them.”
The suspected meteorite was yet to be officially confirmed at 8pm on Thursday. The Desert Fireball Network, the Curtin University-run research group tasked with studying meteorites, fireballs and their pre-Earth orbits, are working to determine the nature of the suspected meteorite.
Meteors occur when rocks from space enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burn up, often called shooting stars. When a meteoroid, a rock still in space, survives its journey through Earth’s atmosphere and hits the ground, it is called a meteorite.
Tucker estimated that an object such as the one observed on Thursday flies over Australia “every few weeks”, though most shooting stars are tiny specks of dust equivalent to the size of a grain of sand.
About 200 tonnes of space rocks hit Earth every day, according to Tucker. He suggested that the green colour of the meteorite seen in dashcam footage indicates the rock could be made of iron and nickel.
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Daniel Lo Surdo is a breaking news reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. He previously helmed the national news live blog for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
