- Flash of light and loud explosion in Melbourne
- Residents woke up from the unrest Wednesday evening
CCTV footage has revealed the strange flash of light which preceded a loud bang heard in Melbourne’s north-east overnight.
In the video, a Doreen resident is in his driveway near his car on Wednesday shortly before 9 p.m. when there appears to be a sudden flash of light followed by an explosive sound.
Residents around Balwyn and Doncaster quickly took to social media for answers.
On Thursday morning, Doreen residents told Sunrise they believed the noise was caused by a meteorite.
Australian National University astronomer Brad Tucker told 3AW the sound was likely caused by a basketball-sized asteroid breaking up.
In the video, a Doreen resident is in his driveway near his car just before 9 p.m. when there appears to be a sudden flash of light followed by an explosive sound.
“A lot of people saw lightning associated with this boom, so it’s likely it was a meteor,” he said.
“A small asteroid has (probably) broken away, traveled through space… and because it’s moving so fast when it hits Earth’s atmosphere, that’s the supersonic boom people hear , all this energy released into the sky.”
Dr Tucker said it was not unusual that residents in a small part of the city saw the asteroid and heard the sonic boom.
“Sometimes they are localized, it depends on their size,” he explained.
“Brightness and explosion will all be relative to size, which gives us an idea that it’s probably a smaller size.”
Dr Tucker said that in this situation the asteroid was probably only 10 to 40cm wide, or about the size of a basketball.
Fragments of the asteroid would have burned up as they entered the atmosphere or landed on Earth.
The astronomer said the smaller the asteroid, the harder it was to detect.
Australian National University astronomer Brad Tucker told 3AW the sound was likely caused by a basketball-sized asteroid breaking up.
Dr Tucker said it was not unusual that residents in only a small part of the city saw the asteroid and heard the sonic boom.
“We’re pretty good at finding anything larger than 100m, we know anything larger than a kilometer, but that’s where a lot of the work happens with these very small objects,” he said.
“Sometimes we don’t know at all, like in this case, or we don’t know until hours later.”
Dr Tucker said that although scientists were worried about the “big ones”, it was very unlikely that an asteroid of a similar size to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would visit Earth.
“This happens about every 50 to 100 million years,” he said.
“But even those measuring tens of meters can release the equivalent of the energy of a nuclear bomb into the atmosphere.”
“We need to watch and worry about those.”
Jason Busuttil, a resident of Langwarrin in Melbourne’s southeast, said he saw the meteor “heading towards the Dandenongs”.
“(It) looked like a train in the sky about 100 meters long,” he said.
