Green fireball over Australia shocks people, astronormers say it might be a meteor

The night of June 15 proved to be very interesting for the astronomy community. A streak of blue light flashed across the sky on the night of Monday. This phenomenon was mainly witnessed by people living in Western Australia. 

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The mysterious green fireball in the sky

Glen Nagle, the education and outreach manager at the CSIRO-NASA tracking station in Canberra, shared with a news agency that the supposed fireball was a spectacular observation. People living in the Pilbara region as well as in the country's Northern Territory and in South Australia also shared also reported sightings of this blue and green fireball, as claimed by a news report.

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What is this green fireball over Australia?

Scientists and members of the astronomy community have brought forward a number of speculations about what the green fireball could be. It could be an object in the atmosphere that was burning which created this streak of bright light. Some astronomers have claimed it to be an object made of human-made debris, for example, the debris from a recent rocket launch. But this possibility was shot down by Ranae Sayers. Ranae is a research ambassador at Curtin University's Space Science and Technology Centre, and she shed some light upon this phenomenon with a news agency. 

Ranae shared that when any kind of space junk enters the atmosphere, humans will be able to see that looks like crackles and sparks. This happens because there is stuff burning up. Other things like solar panels and chunks of metal are also moving all over the place. The fireball which was spotted over Pilbara was smooth in its movement, almost gliding through the sky. This makes the possibility of it being a natural space object higher in the sky.

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Nagle claimed that the bluish-green colour of fireball points out that it has a high iron content. Meteors, which are space rocks that are fiery and are present in the Earth's atmosphere, are also high in iron. Thus, the possibility of the object being a green fireball meteor is also possible.

Sayers, as per the news source, tried to connect this fireball with another similar one that was sighted in Australia in 2017. This fireball had not hit the ground or burned in the atmosphere and rather pushed itself back into space. This meteor could possibly be another grazing encounter as well. According to NASA, around 48.5 tons, which comes up to 44,000 kgs, of meteor material falls on Earth on a daily basis. These space rocks disintegrate entirely as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. 

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