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Last Updated: Oct 24th, 2006 - 17:24:11 |
WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A sonic boom rattled southern New Zealand on Tuesday, and hundreds of callers swamped emergency services about the noise, which scientists said was probably caused by a small meteor plunging toward earth.
Residents in the southern city of Christchurch, 190 miles south of the capital Wellington, told police and fire services that the boom shook the ground and their houses.
The resident superintendent of the Mt. John Observatory, Allan Gilmore, told National Radio the sonic boom indicated the meteor was traveling "very low" and was probably between the size of a baseball and a basketball.
Witnesses said they saw a streak of light in the sky above the sparsely populated region, which then appeared to burn out.
Sonic booms are created when an object moves through the air faster than the speed of sound, about 700 miles per hour.
Christchurch police spokeswoman Maggie Leask said an unusual rock object found on a farm near where the object had streaked through the sky would be handed to the National Radiation Laboratory Wednesday for analysis.
A farmer who found the object, which measures 4 x 2 inches, in a field of his farm south of Christchurch, described it as like nothing he had ever seen before, she said.
A Christchurch Fire Communications spokesman said calls from the public began flooding in at 2:53 p.m., with people reporting windows rattling and the air "shaking."
"I saw the end of it, it was quite big and bright and it was just shooting across the sky, then the light went out," Matthew Miller, who was working about 50 miles south of Christchurch, told National Radio. "Then a minute later we heard the boom from it."
Richard Taylor, a member of the Hinds volunteer rural fire brigade west of Christchurch, said there were unconfirmed reports that an object had fallen from the sky into a paddock in the region, starting a small fire. But he said firefighters had not been called to respond to a fire.
Mt. John Observatory's Gilmore said reports from witnesses seemed to confirm the meteor burst into a "terminal fireball" while traveling over Canterbury.
Thicker air closer to the earth could have slowed it down to about 25,000 miles an hour, he said.
This rapid deceleration often causes meteors to break up.
Meteors low and bright enough to be seen during the day occur once every three to four years in New Zealand.
"If this had happened at night, it would have lit up the whole countryside," Gilmore added.
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