South Australia exploded in the sky a meteoroid the size of a car

Nine News Australia / YouTube

The evening of may 21 in South Australia observed a fireball. A bright flash, accompanied by thunder, illuminated the sky in the States of South Australia and Victoria. Eyewitnesses to flight heaven were numerous eyewitnesses, including in Adelaide, and videos of him have flooded social networks.

Astronomer David Finlay that manages Australia Meteor Reports page in Facebook, told the Australian broadcasting Corporation ABC that a celestial body fell into the ocean 400 km South of Adelaide. Its mass is estimated at 20-40 tonnes, and the size is comparable to a sports car. When entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the meteoroid had a speed of about 40 thousand km/h, and the power of the explosion amounted to 1.6 kilotons of TNT – that’s around a tenth of the power of the atomic bomb in the Japanese Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

“In the four years that I run Australia Meteor Reports, this is the biggest event that we saw,” said Finley.

According to the astronomer, despite the fact that the meteoroid broke apart in the explosion, he was a danger to the settlements, as the land could have fallen the fragments of a total weight of 3-4 tons. The stones could penetrate the roofs of houses and cars and would represent a mortal danger for the population.

Dr Steve Chesley of the jet propulsion Laboratory of NASA (JPL) told me that this particular meteor was quite small by the standards of the National aerospace Agency of the USA. The age of a celestial body amounts to tens of millions of years, and the place of its origin is the asteroid belt out past Mars. Scientists compared the size of the meteoroid with a small car and noted that objects of this size enter the atmosphere of our planet is about 3-6 times a year.

Recall, the Most famous in recent years was the fall of the meteorite 15 February 2013 in Chelyabinsk region. The size of the asteroid was 19.8 meters in diameter and weight is 13 tons. Then injuring about a thousand inhabitants. 16 Oct largest fragment of the meteorite weighing about 600 kg was raised from the mud at the bottom of lake Chebarkul with a depth of approximately 20 meters.