Australian meteor: Scientists search for remnants of late-night fireball

Curtin University professor Phil Bland told CNN it was "almost certainly" a chunk of asteroid coming through the atmosphere, an event which he said occurs only a couple of times a year.

Bland is the founder of the Desert Fireball Network, a group of scientists working to track the path of meteors and asteroids across the night sky, with a goal to building a "geological map of the solar system."

He called for anyone who finds an unusual lump of rock to give him a call, saying he'd be "chuffed" to find it.

One witness told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) they had heard a "boom" before seeing the light in the sky.

"We just thought it was lightning to start with, but the boom that came after it was definitely not thunder," she told ABC Radio Perth. "It shook the whole house, the windows, the dog went psycho."

In 2015, stunned commuters in Bangkok watched as a fireball streaked across the sky in the middle of the day, while social media erupted in excitement when a similar burst of light flew across Texas one year earlier.

I had lightning strike behind my house last month very close- I was turned around so I didn’t see where but the light flash was extremely bright and the *BOOM* was immediate and extremely loud- you felt it as much as heard it and my car alarm went off.

It was right by my tree line because when I turned around (after I jumped nearly 3 feet) I cuold see smoke and steam rising.

The funniest thing, though, was all my chickens squawked like crazy and flew into the air. I don’t know why but I thought it looked hilarious.

Although a 10 MT bomb’s fireball flattens against the stratosphere, I don’t think the a major asteroid strike would do this.

Here’s my take on the Chicxulube strike:

A Chicxulub-sized event rings the planet like a bell, any fault that is near its critical strain is apt to let loose.

Doctors and coroners have a term, coup contercoup, that means damage to the opposite side of the brain from where the skull was struck.

Imagine you are standing on the spot exactly on the opposite side from the strike. The shock waves race around the globe and come together (focus, if you will) right under your feet!

On a lower gravity bodies such as the moon, big impacts have delivered sufficient coup countercoup force to jet material off into space.

I don’t doubt that nearby magma would be squirted up through the resulting shattered bedrock.

Add to that the fact that Chicxulub was a shallow water strike and the surrounding sea formed a wall around the white hot crater as it attempted to flood in. It was like a 120 mile wide rocket nozzle jetting vaporized seawater and any entrained atmosphere into space. As the crater was quenched, the force of the boiling reduced, and the remaining flood of sea water and air steam-cleaned half the planet.

It was a bad day.

On land nothing larger than a house cat survived. I suspect all the surviving animals were burrow dwellers, animals already used to breathing lower oxygen content than their larger peers. The thinned atmosphere was a final insult to the bigger surface dwellers.

Back in the late ‘60s I was a lifeguard at a rooftop pool in an apartment building in N.W. D.C. I was watching lightning strike several miles away near Catholic University and wondered why lightning never seems to strike nearby. No sooner than that, a huge bolt of lightning hit the apartment building roof at the same level right across the street where I was looking. I remember that the flash was yellow-white and as wide as a Volkswagen with a neon pink center band maybe a two foot wide. The thunderclap was instantaneous. I ran down ten stories to the apartment garage in my swimsuit and was in my car leaving, before I gathered my senses, and asked “What am I doing?”

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