Video of Green Fireball Exploding Over Airport Viewed More Than 200K Times

A huge fireball was spotted exploding in a green flash of light over an airport in Australia in a viral video.

The clip was shared on the Facebook page of Cairns Airport in Queensland on May 21. It shows a point of bright light falling toward Earth at high speeds, before flashing green and then exploding in an orange fireball as it approached the ground.

“We witnessed some pretty incredible activity across our skies last night!” Cairns Airport captioned the video, which has amassed over 225,000 views. “Who else managed to spot the meteor?”

Others also captured the fireball from other angles across Queensland, including in a video shared by 9News, taken by a man named Jim Robertson. “It’s something you don’t expect driving home,” he told the local media outlet.

“This thing was so huge, and the light was just so bright. There was a plane coming in at the same time, so those pilots would have had a great view,” Robertson said. “It was a fluke experience that we were lucky enough to get on the dashcam.”

This fireball was likely caused by a meteor falling to Earth over this area of northeastern Australia. As meteors—chunks of rock and ice from space—fall into the Earth’s atmosphere, they heat up to immense temperatures due to friction with the atmospheric gas.

“As it comes into Earth’s atmosphere at high speed (above 12 kilometers [7.5 miles] per second), it pushes the air in front of it, causing that air to become superheated (kind of like a shockwave), which in turn causes the surface of the rock to ‘ablate’. Basically, the very surface layer gets superheated, and vaporized,” Jonti Horner, an astrophysics professor at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, previously told Newsweek. “As the thing continues to push through the atmosphere, it gets whittled away from the outside in by this ablation process—until friction with the atmosphere slows it to subsonic speeds.”

Fireballs are caused by larger-than-average meteors, leading to a particularly bright flash of light. These meteors are also referred to as bolides. Usually, only around 5 percent of the original meteoroid makes it to the Earth’s surface. The rest is vaporized as it falls, causing these bright fireballs. Meteors larger than a softball can cause fireballs briefly brighter than a full moon.

Around 500 meteors fall to Earth every year, but only a few are recovered, according to the Planetary Science Institute. This is because they fall into the ocean or are inaccessible places, or because they completely burn up upon reentry. Occasionally, some meteorites survive the descent. Meteors are reclassified as meteorites after they hit the ground.

Annemarie E. Pickersgill is a meteorite-impact scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She told Newsweek in November: “When the original [rock] is very big, more than 50 to 100 meters (164 to 328 feet), it is likely to keep most of its speed and survive passage through the atmosphere.”

Ten years ago, in February 2013, a huge fireball was seen over Chelyabinsk in Russia as a meteor crashed to Earth. It was found to have been around 60 feet across.

“The shock wave from Chelyabinsk luckily didn’t kill anyone, but injured many because of broken windows due to the shock wave,” Hadrien Devillepoix previously told Newsweek. He is a research associate at the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

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