By Dan Satherley of RNZ
An expert says it’s possible a fireball seen over the North Island on Wednesday night left behind space rocks for scientists to examine, and enthusiasts to look at – but not touch.
The meteor lit up the skies over Taranaki, including the maunga, just before 11pm, and was caught on camera.
Andy Banks didn’t see the event live, but early on Thursday morning heard about it and realised he might have caught it on one of his cameras in Kaponga.
“Turns out the roof camera had the best view, and what a view,” he said in an email to RNZ. “Having the mountain as a backdrop just added to the phenomenon.”
He wasn’t the only one to capture it. Fireballs Aotearoa said it “fell over the ocean west of Marakopa”.
“I was having a joint on the doorstep and looked up,” one follower commented on Facebook, calling it “bright as”.
Te Whatu Stardome Observatory and Planetarium education lead Dr Kaitlyn Martin said it was difficult to tell from the videos how large the rock was when it lit up, but it “would have been considerably larger before entering the atmosphere than any fragment surviving near the end”.
“Something between a softball and a rugby ball would be a reasonable rough illustration – certainly we’re not talking about a car-sized asteroid … The glowing that we’re seeing in the videos isn’t the size of the rock itself, but the light produced as it travels through and interacts with the atmosphere.”
While it was heading offshore, Martin said there was a chance that parts of it fell on land.
“When the fireball ‘goes out’, that doesn’t necessarily mean the rock has disappeared. If fragments survive, they slow dramatically and enter what’s called dark flight: they’re no longer travelling fast enough to produce the bright meteor, but they’re still falling.
“Where they eventually land is harder to predict because of factors like wind and size/shape of the remaining fragment impacting the trajectory. But that kind of modelling can be done – Fireballs Aotearoa have successfully used it to recover meteorites or fragments from events like Takapō in 2024 and the Ruamāhanga fireball in July this year.”
Fireballs Aotearoa told 1News it was not planning a hunt for this one, as it probably fell into the ocean, though parts of it may have ended their interplanetary journey on land.
Martin said that, without more analysis, it wouldn’t be clear whether the rock was part of a known shower or a “sporadic meteoroid” – a lone traveller.
“The increasing availability of footage from security cameras and citizen science projects like Fireballs Aotearoa [and] their network of cameras is so useful – the data from multiple observations of the same fireball is really what makes us able to do any type of analysis on path, orbit, size and speed beyond, ‘Wow! Bright flash!’”
She suggested anyone finding a space rock should not disturb it, “because you could contaminate or damage a scientifically valuable sample”.
“The best thing you can do is take photos of the meteorite and its landing site, mark exactly where and when you found it, don’t disturb, and send that information to Fireballs Aotearoa and the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand.”
Eleven meteorites have been found in New Zealand, two of them this decade.