[imagesource:cairnsairport]

A plummeting green light burned through the sky over Australia on Saturday with such a brilliant flash that it could be seen for miles. The tremendous boom emitted as it crashed into the atmosphere was also heard all around, stunning local residents below.

The exploding meteor, known as a bolide, was captured on cameras from Cairns Airport in Queensland, with additional footage from people’s smartphones, dashcams, and security cameras also catching the rare occurrence.

The Guardian noted that businesses and residents from Cairns on the east coast to Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria shared their shots on social media on Sunday.

Behold:

This one was shot by a driver, it seems:

Green flash as meteor flies across sky over Australiahttps://t.co/8Z4VAa6CdG pic.twitter.com/5Iw0xdJGwJ

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) May 22, 2023

Meanwhile, someone’s porch camera captured the moment, too:

#Australia #Meteor pic.twitter.com/X225TnPkSV

— daley (@PadleyDaley) May 20, 2023

Stunning:

Meteor Explodes In A Huge Fireball Over Australia

An exploding meteor caught on camera blazing through the night sky in northern Queensland, Australia. pic.twitter.com/TJ1CsTSUF3

— 朔 (@Fj9ObCGPvx5pWIn) May 23, 2023

And now for the science…

Dr Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian National University, said that 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.

As for the green light part?

Most meteors are made of stony chondrite, but the greenish colour prior to impact in this case was most likely caused by overheating of iron and nickel fragments as the rock broke apart before it hit the ground.

Tucker said that no crater would have been caused by the impact of the rock as it most likely fragmented considerably by the time it reached the surface of Earth.

“It essentially does a belly flop. The friction builds up and causes that glow and then it hits breaking point, which causes the huge flash and the sonic boom,” Tucker said.

He said that the sonic boom is the worrying part of meteors causing damage over populated areas, especially if they’re 10 metres or 20 metres. Just like the 20-metre meteor that exploded with the energy of 500 kilotonnes of TNT over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013:

The explosion knocked people off their feet, shattered windows in 3,600 apartment buildings, and caused a factory roof to collapse. At its most intense, the Chelyabinsk meteor glowed 30 times brighter than the sun, leaving people up to 18 miles away from it with skin and retinal burns.

Holy cow.

🇦🇺Watch the moment a massive ‘fireball’ lights up night skies as it appears to crash to earth in Cairns ,Far North Queensland ☄️#Meteor #queensland #australia #news pic.twitter.com/OGSOU6bfeD

— F.M NEWS (@fmnews__) May 23, 2023

Apparently, meteors crash through our atmosphere all the time, but we don’t take notice all that much. It just so happened that this one, crashing through the sky at 9PM on a Saturday night, was seen by everyone out and about at the time.

[source:guardian]