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A research ship off the coast of Tasmania has captured footage of a meteor shooting into the sky before breaking into the ocean.
The footage was captured by the Investigator, a CSIRO research vessel operating in the area.
Voyager manager aboard investigator John Hooper said capturing the footage was a stroke of luck.
“What we saw when looking at the live stream footage stunned us, the size and brightness of the meteor was incredible,” he said.
“The meteor crosses the sky directly in front of the ship and then breaks – it was great to watch and we were very lucky to have captured everything on the ship’s live stream.”
Glen Nagle of CSIRO’s division of astronomy and space sciences said the footage was a thrilling reminder that space is far from empty.
It had more than 100 tons of space junk reentering Earth’s atmosphere every day, most of which isn’t seen in places like the Southern Ocean.
“When a meteor enters the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, it is the friction of the rock with the atmosphere that causes them to burn, as their kinetic energy is converted into other forms such as heat, light and sound.
“Many meteors were once asteroids, traveling in space following their own trajectory,” Nagle said.
“This changes as they pass close to Earth, where they can be affected by its gravitational pull.
“When they enter our atmosphere, they become meteors and their entry can be visually spectacular.”
At the time he captured the footage, the investigator was about 100km south of Tasmania.
He was in the area to undertake seafloor mapping of a nearby marine park, conduct oceanographic studies, and perform sea trials for a variety of marine equipment.
This Story Watch a meteor break over the Southern Ocean that first appeared in The Examiner.
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