Massive fireball caught on camera lighting up Florida sky
Updated
A mysterious bright flash that was captured on camera lighting up the Florida night sky was likely a fireball, an expert says.
The American Meteorological Society said it received more than 150 reports of a bright light in the sky around 11:00pm on Monday (local time).
"The fireball was seen primarily from Florida but witnesses from Georgia and Alabama also reported the event," it said in a statement.
The dashboard cameras of several cars belonging to the North Point Police Department in west Florida caught the fireball — or meteor — as it approached Earth and exploded in a flash.
Associate Professor Jonti Horner, an astronomer and astrobiologist based at the University of Southern Queensland, told the ABC the speed of the fireball's flight across the sky "ruled out a lot of other things that could be burning through the atmosphere".
He said he believed it was a fireball — an event he called "unusual but not so unusual that it never happens".
"It's actually something really cool and really fun," he said.
"Floating through our solar system is the debris from the formation of the Earth, and the other planets, which was 4,500 million years ago.
"Some of those debris reach the Earth… The bigger they are the brighter they are. This one might have been big enough to make it all the way through the atmosphere, but probably fell in the ocean."
He said fireballs "pretty much can happen anywhere at any time".
"The Earth is a target in a shooting gallery, essentially. Everywhere is bombarded at pretty much the same rate," he said.
Australia is among those targets — a similar meteor was recently found on a West Australian farm.
That fireball was located near Morawa with the help of four skyward-pointing outback cameras and reports made to the Fireballs in the Sky citizen science app.
The 1.5-kilogram meteorite was estimated to be older than Earth.
Topics: planets-and-asteroids, astronomy-space, science-and-technology, human-interest, united-states
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