Residents in central Victoria reported seeing a large meteor streaking across the night sky on Sunday, with some 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 that the meteor passed “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.” Soon after, she 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, from 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,” he said. 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,” he said. He added that fragments could have made it to the ground, though none have been found yet.
Horner noted that the Australian Desert Fireball Network, operated out of Curtin University, has cameras to capture such events. He estimated Australia experiences a meteor event like this between five to ten times each year.
