Meteoroid fireball blazes across night sky: ‘Pretty incredible’

Weird But True

Through Andrew Court

May 22, 2023 | 11:01am

Watch this space.

The search continues for pieces of a meteor that crashed near Cairns, Australia, on Saturday night.

The meteoroid fireball, which gave off a neon-green color as it reverberated through the atmosphere, lit up the sky upon impact and shocked citizens.

The incredible astronomical event was captured by a security camera at Cairns Airport, with the footage going viral.

“We witnessed some pretty incredible activity in our skies last night,” the airport wrote Facebook under a stunning clip.

The video thrilled the 45,000 space lovers who belong to the Facebook group Australian Meteor Reports. Some of them are now looking for the remains of the meteoroid.

The rock is believed to have landed somewhere near the small town of Croydon, about 250 miles from Cairns.

“I heard people might be coming to look for it,” said Croydon Shire Mayor Trevor Pickering ABC Australia. “There must be pieces of it lying around somewhere.”

“Finding the site was difficult, but I really wanted to put a helicopter in and have a bit of a fly-around,” he added.

Professor Paulo De Souza from Griffith University told the ABC that he believed it was a common metallic meteorite, due to the blue and green color it gave off as it lit up the sky.

Finding any remnants of space rock would be extremely difficult.

“You’d have to win the lottery to find a really special piece of rock that came from a unique place,” he revealed.

Meanwhile, Professor Phil Bland, from Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, explained that, in most cases, an entire meteoroid “burns up and nothing lands”.

However, given the “sonic boom” felt by some residents in Croydon, the professor believes meteor hunters may be lucky this time.

“There’s a chance something went,” he declared optimistically.