Meteor lights up the sky throughout Victoria

“They’re not dangerous. They won’t be particularly hot or cold at this stage but there’s a lot of rocks out there in rural Victoria, so trying to identify a meteor amongst them can be pretty tricky,” Brown stated.

“There are lots of surveillance videos that seem to have picked it up, dash-cams too, so they might help narrow down where it’s landed. It will also depend on the terrain where it landed as to whether these chunks of rock can be found.”

Brown stated if any meteorites landed, they might most likely be centimetres in measurement.

Brown additionally recalled a Canadian household’s home digicam captured a meteorite touchdown close to the entrance door final 12 months. It was the primary time such an occasion was caught on digicam.

“If you have a look at that video, it’s not exactly an asteroid disaster movie, it’s much more of a curiosity,” Brown stated.

The Perseid meteor bathe is predicted to peak on Wednesday and Thursday, so astronomers have been anticipating to see exercise in Australian skies.

But Astronomer Perry Vlahos informed this masthead that Sunday evening’s sighting was not a part of any meteor bathe such because the Perseids or Alpha Capricornids.

“This would be what’s called a ‘sporadic meteor’, which refers to all meteors we see with a non-specific origin,” Vlahos stated.

“The reason it’s not a Perseid is because the ‘radiant’ – the point the meteors appear to radiate out from – never rises above the horizon for us at the latitude of Victoria.

“In order for it to be one, it would have to be travelling upward from horizon to zenith …which is not what was observed.”

Vlahos added it was a meteor, not a meteorite because it hadn’t hit the bottom as of the data accessible on Sunday evening, however astronomers have been nonetheless reviewing video of the meteor, therefore some elements of it might have made it to floor.

“It burns out in the sky, way before hitting the ground, so it won’t be a meteorite [which becomes so once it hits the ground],” Vlahos stated.

“At this stage, we can only call it a meteor. There’s a third name for them – meteoroid, for when they’re travelling through space and before they enter the atmosphere.”