CCTV footage has revealed the strange flash of light that preceded a loud explosion heard in Melbourne, northeastern Australia, overnight.
In the video, a Doreen resident is standing in the driveway next to his car just before 9 pm when there appears to be a sudden flash of bright light followed by an explosive sound.
Residents in the surrounding areas of Balwyn and Doncaster quickly took to social media to find answers.
On Thursday morning, Doreen locals told Sunrise they believed the noise was caused by a meteorite.
Australian National University astronomer Brad Tucker told 3AW the sound was probably due to the breakup of a basketball-sized asteroid.
“Many people saw flashes associated with this boom, so it is likely that it was a meteor,” he said.
A man from Doreen, Australia, in his driveway before his neighborhood was hit by a light burst caused by an asteroid. YouTube/7News Australia
“A piece of asteroid (probably) broke off, traveled through space… and because it travels so fast when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere, that’s the sonic boom that people hear, all this energy is released into the sky “.
Tucker said it was not unusual for residents of only a small part of the city to have seen the asteroid and heard the sonic boom.
“Sometimes they are localized, it depends on the size,” he said.
“The brightness and pop will be relative to the size, which gives us a clue that it will probably be a smaller size.”
Tucker said that in this situation the asteroid was probably only 4 to 16 inches wide, about the size of a basketball.
The asteroid fragments would have burned up as they entered the atmosphere or would have reached Earth.
The astronomer said that the smaller the asteroid, the more difficult it was to detect it.
“We’re pretty good at finding anything larger than 100 meters, anything larger than a kilometer we know, but this is where a lot of the work is done with these really small ones,” he said.
“Sometimes we don’t know anything, like in this case, or we only know it hours apart.”
Tucker said that while scientists worried about “the big ones,” it was highly unlikely that an asteroid similar in size to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would visit Earth.
“This happens approximately every 50 to 100 million years,” he said.
“But even those that are tens of meters in size can release the equivalent of energy of a nuclear bomb into the atmosphere.
“We have to monitor them and worry about them.”
Jason Busuttil, a resident of Langwarrin in Melbourne’s outer south-east, said he saw the meteor “heading towards the Dandenongs”.
“It looked like a train in the sky about 100 meters long,” he said.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn