What Pretorians spotted in the night sky was a shooting star, not a meteor shower
"It would have been about five meters big when it entered the atmosphere and started to break-up and looked like a larger shooting star."
Large shooting stars – also known as bolides – usually hit the earth five to 10 times a year.
This time it graced Pretoria skies. On Tuesday evening, many Pretoria residents shared photos of what seemed like a large shooting star broken in different parts and thought it was a meteor shower.
But experts were quick to point out this was not the case. South African Astronomical Observatory astronomer Daniel Cunnama said what many Pretorians saw was possibly a large shooting star also known as a bolide.
“From what I can see, it is not a meteor shower. A meteor shower occurs when you have a whole lot of meteors over a course of a night or a few days,” he said.
“The way a meteor shower happens is when one would go out at night and you would see a shooting star every minute or two and that is not what we are experiencing here, it was a single object.”
Cunnama said although he had not had much time to study the object in detail, he estimated that it would have been between one to five meters big when it entered the atmosphere and started to break-up and looked like a larger shooting star.
“There is a very small chance of some of this material hitting the ground and we will look into that. There are teams that will look if there was any chance of anything hitting the ground.”
Cunnama said such objects usually hit the atmosphere five to 10 times a year, around the world and this time it happened in Pretoria.
“We cannot predict when one can actually hit the atmosphere again.”
Cunnama said there was not a particular reason as to why the large rock surfaced in the sky.
“There are rocks that fly around the space all the time, some small and some large.
These rocks are flying around in space all the time, and they are also orbiting the sun and sometimes they interact with the Earth.
“We cannot predict these events and we cannot say that there will be another one now.”
Also read: Centurion wakes up to yet another earth tremor
A Pretoria resident who managed to capture the large shooting star, Nicole Verwey, said she saw the star around 18:20 while driving in Botha Avenue in Centurion.
“I was amazed and scared because I didn’t know what I was seeing. This was the first time I saw something like it. I actually thought this is how it is in doomsday movies,” she said.
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