Bright fireball streaks across Australian sky

A fireball fell over Western Australia, lighting up the night sky and attracting many onlookers.

Dashcams and observatories in Western Australia captured images of a green-blue fireball streaking across the sky on November 22, at around 8:50 p.m. local time. According to the Perth Observatory, many people witnessed the moment the fireball fell in the southwest of Western Australia.

These fireballs are typically caused by meteorites and are larger than average. They are also called bolides and are accompanied by a bright flash due to the intense heat generated by friction with the atmosphere. The green color of the fireball may be a result of iron in the meteorite.

Some people speculate that the meteorite could be a large object from the Leonid meteor shower, which peaked on November 24. The Leonid is an annual meteor shower that occurs when Earth passes through ice and rock left over from a comet orbiting the Sun in a 33-year orbit. According to Samantha Rolfe, a lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, England, Leonids are one of the more frequent and predictable meteor showers of the year. The dust cloud that Earth passed through was formed when the Temple-Tuttle comet heated up in the inner solar system, releasing gas that pushed small rocks.

As Earth passes through the part of its orbit that intersects the Temple-Tuttle dust trail, rocks and ice fall through the planet’s atmosphere, Rolfe explained. These are usually as small as grains of sand and become meteoroids when they interact with Earth’s atmosphere. They vaporize and create a flash of light lasting about a second, called a shooting star.

However, it is possible that the meteorite that fell in Western Australia was just a stray object unrelated to the Leonid meteor shower. Curtin University’s Desert Fireball Network is trying to determine where the meteorite fell, using its path across the sky. If the original rock was quite large, more than 50 to 100 meters long, it is likely to have been able to maintain much of its speed and survive its journey through the atmosphere, said Annemarie E. Pickersgill, a meteorite impact scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

An Khang (According to Newsweek )

Source link