(same story) meteor sighting creates stir
By JENNY DENNIS
June 18, 2004
Heaven-sent: David Finlay holds a piece of meteorite. Mr Finlay is keen to contact anyone who saw a meteorite impact near Bulli. Picture: KIRK GILMOUR
IT WASN'T a bird, it wasn't a plane, and it certainly wasn't Superman ... but what it was has the experts at odds.
Several South Coast stargazers have reported seeing a strange phenomenon in the sky on Wednesday night.
ABC Illawarra radio was dominated yesterday morning by talkback callers eager to chat about their sightings. Some callers reported seeing a similar phenomenon on Tuesday night.
They described the Wednesday sighting as a silvery, green trail of light which appeared to explode in a bright flash on impact.
At 6am yesterday, the NSW Police Media Unit sent out a media release titled "Suspected meteor - Bulli". It said Camden police were investigating a report of a meteorite overnight, sighted by a motorist driving south on the Hume Hwy near Menangle around 9pm.
The object was described as glowing silver then exploding like an artillery shell.
It was believed to have fallen out of the sky around the escarpment at Bulli Tops. The motorist told police it was "as big as a house", but a police spokesperson said extensive patrols of the area had been unable to locate anything.
Australian National University astronomer Vince Ford yesterday said it sounded like a sizeable chunk of rock breaking up in the atmosphere.
Dr Ford, who is based at the Mt Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, said if something as big as a house had hit the earth it would have made a sonic boom and registered on seismological graphs.
He said the object was likely to have been less than a metre in diameter and that no fragments nor a crater would be found.
"It really does sound like a fireball to me," Dr Ford said.
Supporting that view was Sydney Observatory astronomer and curator Nick Lomb.
A fireball was "the glowing gas that surrounds a piece of rock as it travels from space through the earth's atmosphere", Dr Lomb said.
The University of Wollongong's associate dean of science, Ted Bryant, believes people saw debris from a disintegrating comet.
"Two within two days makes me think it was probably a debris trail," he said.
June was a time when the earth passed through a number of debris trails, Dr Bryant said. The debris could range in size from a grain of sand to a boulder, travelling "about 40km per second".
"That's what makes them so dangerous, even the small ones, because they tend to explode."
Even small pieces of debris, falling at that pace, could damage cars or houses that got in their way.
From the descriptions, he thought what fell from the sky over Wollongong was probably not big.
"Otherwise people would have been reporting hearing a sound with it."
Fairy Meadow-based amateur astronomer David Finlay is putting his money on the object being a meteorite, and a sizeable one.
He estimates it would be about the size of a washing basket, and he's desperate to track it down.
"Nobody is really organised to do this sort of thing," he said.
"So I've taken it upon myself to try and collect as much information as I can."
He's hoping to hear from witnesses so he can pinpoint the possible location in which to search.
Meteorites can be valuable. The 1.3kg "hot rock" that smashed through the roof of a house in Auckland last Saturday could be worth more than $6300, experts have said.
Mr Finlay said that if the Bulli meteorite was made of something rare, like a piece of the moon or of Mars, it could be worth thousands of dollars.
He's asked anyone who saw the object fall from the sky to contact him via the Mercury.
illawarramercury.com.au |
