Mysterious burst of light and loud bang in Melbourne’s night sky could be meteorite

A mysterious loud boom that startled a neighbourhood across Melbourne’s north is believed to be a meteorite hitting Earth’s atmosphere.

The residents in Doreen, a suburb in Melbourne, heard a loud explosion at around 9pm Wednesday, capturing videos of the moment when it happened.

CCTV footage shared on social media by a Doreen resident showed a sudden burst of light, accompanied by a noise resembling a loud bang, as a resident was stepping out of his car.

Several locals took to social media to report their experiences and asked what was the “massive explosion” while some linked it to an astronomical phenomenon.

“Our whole house shook,” a resident said on X, sharing the CCTV footage that someone posted on a local page, guessing it “maybe a meteorite?”

“Ok, massive explosion wasn’t how I expected tonight to go!”, one user who was from Mernda area said. “What in the world was that?!”

The authorities are yet to comment on origin of the sound.

But an astronomer from the Australian National University told Melbourne-based radio show 3AW that the flash and boom suggest it could be a meteor.

“It would have been a bit of an asteroid broke off, travelled through space, [and] hit the Earth’s atmosphere,” Mr Tucker said.

He said given the velocity at which the material would be moving, a "sonic boom" would become audible upon its entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

“Essentially all this energy [is] being released in the sky, and the meteor or asteroid fragment [is] breaking apart.”

He said the brightness and the sound of explosion are based on the size of the material entering into the Earth from space.

Dr Gail Isles, a science expert from RMIT University, told the show that the object could potentially be a meteor, especially considering the ongoing Perseid meteor shower, which is anticipated to peak this weekend.

But said it could more likely a fragment from a navigation satellite rocket launched from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

"It’s come back in somewhere between the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere and then it started to appear quite large to our eyes from Melbourne,” Dr Isles said.

“We’ve seen it as this big burning fireball.”

In August, residents in Victoria saw a ball of light passing over the night sky and heard a loud boom. Australia’s space agency later confirmed that it was a space junk, remnants of a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket which re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.