It’s a bird. … It’s a plane. … It’s a meteor?
Multiple people in the Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland reported seeing a large fireball dropping in the sky before 6 a.m. on Thursday — and one space expert said he bets it was a meteor.
Video shows the ball of light streaking across the sky down the east coast of Australia. The eyewitnesses called the sighting in to 2GB radio host Ben Fordham, UPI reported.
Australian National University astrophysicist Brad Tucker told Fordham he believed it was a meteor, with a green color indicating iron and nickel burning up in the atmosphere, the outlet reported.
“It’s unlikely fragments fell on the ground,” Tucker said.
“It clearly covered a lot of distance in a short amount of time. So definitely a broken chunk of an asteroid that randomly hit the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Some asteroids travel at speeds of 50,000 to 100,000 kilometers per hour, and this one would likely have been visible across Australia, Tucker added.
