Fireball
© Solua Middleton/ABCDr Andy Tomkins says meteorites can been seen hundreds of kilometres away from ground level.
Dr Andy Tomkins is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Geoscienes at Monash University.

He says there were reported sightings of a loud, white flash at ground level at around 6:30pm on the worldwide meteorites news website.

"It would have been a meteorite coming in somewhere from Mars and Jupiter, they usually come from that sort of orbit, and just coming through our atmosphere really, really fast and burning up as it came through the atmosphere and hopefully landing on the ground."

Dr Tomkins encourages people to check their CTTV cameras from Sunday evening in hope of locating the meteorite.

"We can use that to figure out the direction that the meteorite came from and where it's likely to have ended up on the ground, particularly if there is some sort of time stamp on the video that really helps us nail it down as well."

"We use video from multiple directions from where people have seen it from multiple angles to triangulate down toward the ground position."

He says people who heard a loud bang on Sunday evening would have been within close proximity to its landing.

"Usually it gets brighter the closer you are to it, then a bang, the boom people heard is when you're really close to it, people can usually see a smoke trail if they're fairly close."

Dr Tomkins says the meteorite would have been the size of a car before exploding into the lower atmosphere.

"Usually if they're a stony meteorite, they usually explode in the lower atmosphere and shower the ground with lots of little meteorites."

Freshly fallen meteorites are usually magnetic and have a black, shiny outer surface, however once on the ground a light interior can be seen.

Dr Tomkins says locating meteorites on ground level is quite rare, with an estimated eight recoveries per year.

"People are only awake for brief periods during the evening, they don't' see all of them, a lot of them land in the ocean."

"We're talking about thousands of tonnes of meteoric material that actually comes to the earth from space every year."

Dr Tomkins says if a meteorite is recovered, it can help scientists understand the solar system.

"It tells us the age of the solar system, which is 4567 million years old, the chemical composition of the solar system and the earth ultimately, what the earth's core is made of, where the earth's water came from, tells us all about how life might have come to earth."

Dr Tomkins recommends anyone with footage to send it to his friend, David Finlay, an astronomy enthusiast who alerted the university about this particular sighting.

David Finlay's email is starfield7@gmail.com