On Saturday, residents in northeast Australia witnessed a fireball-like object shooting across the sky. An incredible video was captured at Cairns Airport in Queensland, which shows a meteor flashing a bright green as it lights up the night sky, before appearing to crash.
The incident took place at 9.22 pm in Australia and was observed across multiple suburbs spanning from Barcaldine in the state's far west to Cooktown in the far north, reported News.com.au.
Watch the video here:
According to Guardian, residents in the small town of Croydon, about 500km west of Cairns, said on social media that they had also felt an explosion and heard a huge bang.
Dr Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian National University, told Guardian Australia the rock was likely between 0.5 and 1 metre in size, making it a smaller to average-sized meteor, and was likely travelling up to 150,000km/h.
The video gained a lot of traction on Facebook. A user commented, "Imagine if this landed a couple of hundred kilometres closer to the sea, that would have been a problem. How is it that the first we all knew of it was when we saw it hit the ground."
Another user wrote, "Love to know its landing spot!"
The third user commented, "Based on what people have found after comparable fireballs, it would certainly have landed. But not impacted - in the sense that it wouldn't have hit the ground at cosmic velocity (>12 km/sec), but at more like 300 km/hour."
As per NASA, meteorites are rocks from space that enter the Earth's atmosphere and hit the ground.
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