Scientists are investigating whether an object that smashed and partially melted a man’s car windscreen was a meteorite, in what could potentially be a world-first case of a collision with a moving vehicle.<\/p>\n
Whyalla vet Andrew Melville-Smith was travelling along the Augusta Highway, 40 kilometres past Port Germein, when he heard a “loud” and “violent” bang.<\/p>\n
“A truck went past \u2014 five to 10 seconds later, there was an enormous explosion,” Dr Melville-Smith said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Andrew Melville-Smith with his damaged car. (ABC North & West: George Yankovich)<\/p>\n
“Glass went flying inside the car, there was white smoke everywhere, and we could smell burning. My wife thought the car was on fire.<\/p>\n
“I thought we’d crashed, it was that loud, it was that violent, it was totally unexpected.”<\/p>\n
Dr Melville-Smith said he did not see the object strike the windscreen, but was left bleeding and was covered in glass fragments.<\/p>\n
He said his car, an electric Tesla set to self-driving mode, did not stop when struck.<\/p>\n
“The car was driving along and unconcerned \u2026 it wasn’t aware of the chaos that was going on in the cabin,” he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Andrew Melville-Smith says the impact left him bleeding and covered in glass fragments. (Supplied: Andrew Melville-Smith)<\/p>\n
He said he initially thought the idea of a meteorite hitting his car was a “load of rubbish” but contacted the South Australian Museum to investigate.<\/p>\n
“A lot of people go, ‘No way,'” he said.<\/p>\n
“[But] offer another explanation \u2014 what else melts your windscreen?<\/p>\n
“I think I’d have more luck buying a lottery ticket because it is so rare.”<\/p>\n
Investigation begins<\/p>\n
The SA Museum’s mineralogy assistant collection manager, Kieran Meaney, said that if the object proved to be a meteorite, it would be a world-first case of one hitting a moving vehicle.<\/p>\n
“The odds of that happening are just phenomenally low \u2014 if he had been driving 10 kilometres faster or slower, it would have missed him,” Dr Meaney said.<\/p>\n
He said he was initially hesitant about Dr Melville-Smith’s claims, but once he saw the photos, he thought an earthly explanation “didn’t add up”.<\/p>\n
“Andrew’s first thought was that it was a bullet, or a stone had been flicked up from a truck, but the police quickly ruled that out,” Dr Meaney said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kieran Meaney says researchers will analyse the windscreen. (ABC News: Sarah Maunder)<\/p>\n
“The really unusual thing is that the glass of his windscreen has actually melted a little bit; there was a lot of heat in whatever hit the windscreen; that’s the key thing I can’t find a good explanation for.<\/p>\n
“It may be the case once we investigate further, we find out it’s something different, but at the moment that’s the theory we are working with.”<\/p>\n
Dr Meaney said the team would analyse the windscreen for any debris that became lodged in the glass during the collision, a process which could take weeks or months.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Scientists hope to find fragments of the unidentified object lodged in the windscreen to analyse.\u00a0 (Supplied: Andrew Melville-Smith)<\/p>\n
He said they would also investigate whether the object could have been falling space junk or pieces of an old satellite.<\/p>\n
“We’ll do chemical analyses to see what they’re made of, if they match any known meteorite or something closer to Earth,” he said.<\/p>\n
“If we do find out that it is a meteorite, we will probably end up going out to where this happened and trying to find the bit of rock.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Andrew Melville-Smith says the sound was so loud he initially thought he had crashed. (ABC North & West: George Yankovich)<\/p>\n
Expert ‘sceptical’<\/p>\n
Jonti Horner, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, said he had “good cause” to be sceptical about whether the object was a meteorite, given he had not seen reports of flashes of light.<\/p>\n
“Two, three or four minutes before this rock hit the car, there should have been very widely observed across that region a fireball in the sky, at least as bright as a full moon if not significantly brighter,” Professor Horner said.<\/p>\n
He said small meteorite falls occurred “all the time” in Australia, and there had been examples overseas of meteorites hitting parked cars.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jonti Horner says the case is a “challenging” one. (University of Southern Queensland: David Martinelli)<\/p>\n
He said contrary to what is portrayed in Hollywood films, meteorites are typically cold to the touch by the time they land on Earth.<\/p>\n
“The reason is these things have been held at the cold, cold temperatures at the depths of space for billions of years, and they’ve had a fleeting few seconds of being heated up as they pass through the atmosphere,” he said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0“That means they have a very thin layer of heat on the outside and a lot of cold on the inside.”<\/p>\n
Professor Horner said the case was a “challenging” one to piece together, and other potential theories should not be ruled out.<\/p>\n
“Maybe it’s something that’s fallen off an aircraft flying overhead,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Not saying it isn’t a meteorite, I’m just saying there is good cause to be sceptical when it could just be a rock from another source.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists are investigating whether an object that smashed and partially melted a man’s car windscreen was a meteorite,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[146433,25273,43,33973,44,146434,128,285,41,39,42,40,60036,81737,146435],"class_list":["post-246528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-augusta-highway","tag-damage","tag-headlines","tag-meteorite","tag-news","tag-sa-museum","tag-science","tag-space","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-vet","tag-whyalla","tag-windscreen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}