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© Ezi-Web Wholesale Bargara/ Tim SayreA view of the meteor from The Hummock Lookout, left, and a still from dashcam footage taken on McCarthy Road, in Bundaberg.
Tim Sayre and his wife were two skygazers left in awe when the night sky lit up above their car about 6.40pm on Monday.
They captured the shooting star on dashcam on McCarthy Road, in Bundaberg.
"Really a case of the right place, right time!" Sayre told 7NEWS.com.au.
© Photo by Katherine Joy (University of Manchester)Meteorite recovery campaign in the Atacama Desert (Nov. 2017).
"Our purpose in this work was to see how the meteorite flux to Earth changed over large timescales-millions of years, consistent with astronomical phenomena," says Alexis Drouard, Aix-Marseille Université, lead author of the new paper in Geology.
To recover a meteorite record for millions of years, the researchers headed to the Atacama Desert. Drouard says they needed a study site that would preserve a wide range of terrestrial ages where the meteorites could persist over long time scales.
© Photo by Jérôme Gattacceca (CEREGE)Meteorite with thin, dark, fusion crust in the Atacama Desert.
"The Atacama Desert in Chile, is very old ([over] 10 million years)," says Drouard. "It also hosts the densest collection of meteorites in the world."
© Western UniversityAn expedition in 1929 discovered the extent of the damage caused by the Tunguska Event in 1908.
When considering catalysts for catastrophic collision, there are two main sources Near Earth Objects (NEOs) like asteroids and meteoroids and interlopers from the outer solar system, which are typically comets. Over the past few decades, a great deal of effort has been expended in cataloguing more than 90 per cent of the potentially hazardous NEOs, and work is ongoing to detect, catalogue and track greater numbers and smaller sizes of these objects. Interlopers from the outer solar system are much harder to chart but again, much work is underway.
The Taurid swarm is a third potential source of risk that changes the probabilities of possible catastrophic impacts. The Tunguska (Russia) explosion of 1908 is considered a one-in-1000-year event, assuming a random distribution of events over time. But the Taurid swarm, a dense cluster within the Taurid meteoroid stream, and through which the Earth periodically passes, changes the odds significantly and gives a possible reason for the unlikely occurrence that a once per 1000-year event occurred just over a century ago. If the hypothesized might of the Taurid swarm is successfully proven, this also heightens the possibility of a cluster of large impacts over a short period of time.
© ESO / M. KornmesserOne artist's impression shows ʻ1I/'Oumuamua as a cigar-shaped object.
'1/'Oumuamua, the interstellar mystery object that briefly visited the inner solar system in 2018, has proven a difficult nut to crack. Astronomers are still arguing about what it even is - asteroid, comet, or something else altogether? Now, in a pair of studies posted recently on the arXiv (paper 1, paper 2), Zdenek Sekanina (JPL-Caltech) suggests the object might be an ultra-low density fragment from a comet that disintegrated while passing near the Sun.
© Associated Press
Libyan desert glass is the name given to fragments of canary-yellow glass found scattered over hundreds of kilometres, between giant shifting sand dunes.
Interest in Libyan desert glass goes back more than 3,000 years. Among items recovered from King Tut's burial chamber is a gold and jewel-encrusted breastplate. In the centre sits a beautiful scarab beetle, carved from Libyan desert glass.
Libyan desert glass - raw and carved - is easily available today, but how the glass formed has long puzzled scientists.
Our research has found the answer.
© ABCKiwis and Australians witnessed a short but stunning light show as a meteor burnt up in the atmosphere just after midnight.
At around 12.25am Northlanders were woken to a flight of light, a deep rumbling and a flash of colour flying off the burning meteor.
Locals took to social media to describe what they saw and heard, with many revealing they thought it was a supersonic aircraft.
"It was a meteor. I saw it really close overhead at Oromahoe shortly after midnight. I could see green, yellow, orange flames coming off the rock as it burnt up," described one Northlander.
"It was very close and incredibly bright and afterwards there was a long rumbling sound. It was certainly bright enough to be seen at Paihia and Kaikohe."
A meteor has lit up the Northern Territory night sky with a flash that created "daylight" in Alice Springs and a noise that shook windows.
NT Police Duty Superintendent James O'Brien said officers received a phone call from an Alice Springs resident just after midnight, and quickly started checking their own CCTV vision.
The footage shows the meteor also shooting over Tennant Creek, more than 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs.
"We were a bit dubious about it," he said.
"But then we started looking around our CCTV and the one in Tennant Creek sees this beautiful purple light coming down.
"And the ones in Alice Springs basically show Alice Springs showing up like daylight. It was quite magnificent."
© YouTube/AMS/M. Statham
Comment: Two other similar events have happened over the same continent within the last 8 days: Spectacular light show as meteor fireball lights up south-eastern Australia
Meteor fireball detonates over Australia's Northern Territory, turns night into day