Cause of mystery light in Melbourne is revealed after loud explosion woke up neighbours

CCTV footage has revealed the bizarre flash of light that preceded a loud bang heard in Melbourne’s north-east overnight.

In the video, a Doreen resident is standing in his driveway near his car just before 9 p.m. Wednesday when there appears to be a sudden bright flash of light, followed by an explosive sound.

Residents from the surrounding areas of Balwyn and Doncaster quickly took to social media to find answers.

On Thursday morning, Doreen residents told Sunrise they believed the noise was caused by a meteorite.

Astronomer Brad Tucker of Australian National University told 3AW that the noise was likely due to the breakup of an asteroid the size of a basketball.

In the video, a Doreen resident is standing in his driveway near his car just before 9 p.m. when there appears to be a sudden bright flash of light, followed by an explosive sound.

“Many people saw flashes associated with this explosion, so it is likely it was a meteor,” he said.

‘There’s (probably) a piece of an asteroid broken off, traveling through space… and because it’s traveling so fast when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere, that’s the sonic boom people hear as all this energy is released in the air.’

Dr. Tucker said it was not unusual for residents of just a small part of the city to have seen the asteroid and heard the sonic boom.

“Sometimes they are localized, it depends on the size,” he said.

“The brightness and the explosion will all be relative to size, so that gives us a clue that it’s probably a smaller size.”

Dr. Tucker said the asteroid in this situation was probably only 10-40 cm wide, about the size of a basketball.

Fragments of the asteroid would have either burned up as they entered the atmosphere or reached Earth.

The astronomer said the smaller the asteroid, the harder it was to detect.

Astronomer Brad Tucker of Australian National University told 3AW that the noise was likely due to the breakup of an asteroid the size of a basketball.

Dr. Tucker said it was not unusual for residents of just a small part of the city to have seen the asteroid and heard the sonic boom.

“Anything over 100 meters we’re pretty good at finding, anything over a kilometer we know, but this is where a lot of the work happens with these very small ones,” he said.

‘Sometimes we don’t know it at all, as in this case, or we only know it for hours at a time.’

Dr. Tucker said that while scientists were concerned about “the bigger one,” it was highly unlikely that an asteroid similar in size to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would visit Earth.

“These happen about every 50 to 100 million years,” he said.

‘But even specimens tens of meters in size can release the equivalent of the energy of an atomic bomb into the atmosphere.

“We have to keep an eye on that and worry about it.”

Jason Busuttil, a resident of Langwarrin in Melbourne’s far south-east, said he saw the meteor “heading towards the Dandenongs”.

“(It) looked like a train in the air about 100 meters long,” he said.