On the evening of May 21, a meteor was observed in southern Australia. A bright flash, accompanied by a roar, lit up the sky in the states of South Australia and Victoria. Numerous eyewitnesses, including in the city of Adelaide, witnessed the flight of a heavenly body, and videos with it flooded social networks. Astronomer David Finlay, who runs Australia Meteor Reports on Facebook, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC that the celestial body fell into the ocean 400 km south of Adelaide. Its weight is estimated at 20-40 tons, and its size is comparable to an all-wheel drive car.
When entering the Earth's atmosphere, the meteoroid had a speed of about 40 thousand km / h, and the explosion power was 1.6 kilotons in TNT equivalent - this corresponds to about a tenth of the power of the atomic bomb explosion in Japanese Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. “In the four years that I have run Australia Meteor Reports, this is the largest event we've seen,” said Finlay. According to the astronomer, despite the fact that the meteoroid disintegrated into parts during the explosion, it posed a danger to settlements, since its fragments with a total mass of 3-4 tons could fall to the ground. Stones could pierce rooftops and cars and pose a mortal danger to the population.
Dr. Steve Chesley of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) revealed that this particular meteor was quite small by the US National Aerospace Agency's standards. The age of the celestial body is tens of millions of years, and the place of its origin is the asteroid belt beyond Mars. The scientist compared the size of a meteoroid to a small car and noted that objects of this size enter the atmosphere of our planet about 3-6 times a year.
Recall that the most famous in recent years was the fall of a meteorite on February 15, 2013 in the Chelyabinsk region. The size of the asteroid was 19.8 meters across with a mass of 13 thousand tons. Then about one and a half thousand residents were injured. On October 16, the largest fragment of a meteorite weighing about 600 kg was raised from the silt at the bottom of Lake Chebarkul from a depth of about 20 meters.