Meteor lights up night sky
ÜGEN VOS
JOHANNESBURG - Amateur astronomers are star-struck with the possibility that a meteorite might have crashed to earth somewhere in South Africa on Saturday night.
Scores of eyewitnesses from Johannesburg and Pretoria claim to have seen a “bright light” streaking north of Pretoria.
“We saw this big green ball of fire… it kind of came out of the sky, out of the blue,” residents told 702 Eyewitness News yesterday.
“There was a sudden flash… like an orange stripe in the sky… followed by a very bright explosion, where the sky lit up as if it was daytime,” the witness said.
“What people saw last night (Saturday) was almost certainly a meteor,” Claire Flanagan from the Johannesburg Planetarium told wire agency Sapa yesterday.
“It moved over the Gauteng Province towards Limpopo… it travels very fast and was about 90km up.”
Flanagan says if a bang was heard, it almost certainly meant the meteor had not made it to earth. “The speed at which it was travelling would have caused it to burn and then disintegrate,” she explained.
If the meteor had landed somewhere, it probably would not have caused a major impact.
Flanagan was unable to hazard a guess at the meteor’s approximate size, because the event was unexpected and not connected with any kind of shower.
If the meteor did survive entry, Limpopo seems a likely candidate for a crash site. Amateur astronomer and spokesman for the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (Assa), Sharon Tait, says she received at least 10 reported sightings from Limpopo.
Online message boards have been buzzing with the news and claims that the meteor crashed to earth anywhere from Benoni to a farm in Vanderbijlpark.
Meteors are not that uncommon, but most burn up in the atmosphere. Meteorite collector Ronnie McKenzie says meteors only survive the crucible of entering the earth’s atmosphere about twice or three times a year around the world, making the sightings “quite rare”.
The last spectacle in the skies was the yearly Leonid meteor shower last week.