A meteorite that burned so brightly it appeared on CCTV footage across Victoria is being hunted, as experts suggest its value is priceless.
Residents from Bendigo to Ballarat and Melbourne’s outer west flooded social media after a large fireball was spotted in the sky just before 8pm on August 10.
Experts from Monash University believe it was large enough to hit the ground intact and have now tracked the meteorite’s collision point to a 1km by 3km area of farmland near Dunolly in central Victoria.
‘From a distance, animal poo looks a lot like a meteorite, especially when it’s fresh,’ Monash University geochemist Dr Rachel Kirby told Yahoo News on Thursday.
‘It’s dark, and shiny, and round. Cow poos are a little bit easier to tell apart, but when it comes to horses, it’s a challenge.’
But the meteorite’s value is ‘priceless’, with Dr Kirby suggesting it could be 4.5billion years old.
‘It has the story of our solar system recorded in it… We’re a very small planet in our solar system. Most of our solar system is a vacuum; there’s a lot of space between planets,’ she said.
‘And then a small rock happened to have its path align with ours, and we met in space, and it landed on the Earth. That’s just unlikely and really fortunate.’
Researchers from the university have spent a week trying to find the meteorite by searching paddocks.
The group organised line searches across four properties, spreading out to look for the rock.
When the meteorite shot through the sky, many Victorians leapt on social media to share footage of the extraordinary moment.
‘Seen from around Taylors Lakes heading up on the Calder! Thought it was a firework at first,’ one person wrote.
‘Saw it out of our window in that exact area. Thought it was a firework,’ a resident echoed.
A third user in Ballarat wrote: ‘It was so bright, an orange glow then faded to nothing, looked like it was going so fast!’
Experts have suggested the meteorite could weigh between 1 and 3kg – no bigger than a grapefruit, according to Yahoo News.
‘You can see it stop burning up in the sky, then it falls to the ground like it’s been dropped from a tall building,’ Dr Kirby said.
‘The atmosphere really slows it down, so it might be in a small hole, or sitting closer to the surface.’
Dr Kirby is a member of Desert Fireball Network, which looks to uncover the mysteries surrounding the formation of the solar system by studying meteorites.
If researchers find the meteorite, scientists plan to scan the rock before breaking it open and sampling the inside.