The bright flash and trail of a meteor across the night sky was seen last night from all around Tasmania.<\/p>\n
A traffic camera from Launceston, in the state’s north, captured the event just before 9.30pm on Sunday and people from southern Tasmania also witnessed the bright light.<\/p>\n
“The object flashed a few times as it was coming down, almost certainly because it was breaking up and the light sort of came and went and left a bit of a trail,” said Martin George, the principal astronomer of the Ulverstone Planetarium at Hive Tasmania.<\/p>\n
“This is very typical of an object burning up in the atmosphere, a natural object.”<\/p>\n
People from across the state posted comments on TassieCam’s traffic camera video, which was shared on Facebook.<\/p>\n
“Spectacular display. Lots of falling stars on Saturday night as well,” Kim wrote.<\/p>\n
“Saw it in Kingston was huge and so bright and so fast,” Nardia wrote.<\/p>\n
Astrophysicist Brittany Trubody said the meteor was “quite likely a remnant from the recent Eta Aquariids meteor shower, produced by debris from Halley’s Comet”.<\/p>\n
Dr George said meteors could be surprisingly small.<\/p>\n
“Some people might think it’s a really large object to be so bright. Interestingly enough, even an object as bright as the full moon as it comes down is probably no bigger than a cricket ball or a softball.<\/p>\n
“That’s the kind of size of object that I would estimate it to be based on the video \u2026 Unfortunately I missed it myself, but it would have been a spectacular sight.”<\/p>\n
George said it was likely the meteor broke up at an altitude of about 30 kilometres.<\/p>\n
“That doesn’t mean to say that a meteorite hasn’t fallen to Earth, but \u2026 most of the objects are completely destroyed before they get to the surface.”<\/p>\n
George said the people who saw the meteor were “very lucky”.<\/p>\n
“You had to be out at the right time, looking in the right direction.<\/p>\n
“And these objects are completely unpredictable. They’re random objects that are orbiting the Sun and meet their end when they meet the Earth.<\/p>\n
“So you just have to keep your eyes peeled on the sky as much as you can. [It’s] much more interesting than being indoors all evening.”<\/p>\n
– ABC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bright flash and trail of a meteor across the night sky was seen last night from all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45,147,392],"class_list":["post-421965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}