Be

Comet debris turns on a spectacular display in night sky

18.05.2006
By WILL JACKSON

EVER wanted to know what a fridge hurtling through the atmosphere at 57,000km/h looks like?

Well, even if you haven’t, watch the skies tonight and you might be able to see.

The huge fireball that swooped across the sky about 6.20pm on Tuesday was actually a refrigeratorsized hunk of comet, astronomer Andre Claydon said yesterday.

The Earth is passing through debris left by Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann which has broken up into about 64 pieces, said the director of observation at the Springbrook Observatory near the Gold Coast.

Some of these pieces were hitting the atmosphere and would continue to create a spectacular light show for another five days.



However, they were unlikely to be quite as incredible as Tuesday night’s meteor, which caused quite a stir across the region.

A police spokeswoman said it was seen travelling west as far inland as Warwick in Queensland.

She said a Warwick farmer alerted police about 6.30pm of what he thought was a fireball from a plane crashing on his property.

However a search of the area found nothing.

Police were then inundated by sightings of a ‘green ball of light’.

Andre said the meteor shower would have appeared much closer than it actually was.

"As it comes in through our atmosphere we get a magnification effect, so it always looks a lot closer, but it is probably 60 to 70km inside our atmosphere," he said.

"I had a number of phone calls specifically from the eastern part of Australia regarding a meteor shower that has come through and broken up into a few pieces."

posted by ... @ 7:43 PM