We’ve talked about it in chat but it’s probably threadworthy. Some of the videos show the camp lights in the background and, comparing them, this really must have been an extraordinarily bright meteor.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-15/green-glowing-space-object-filmed-over-pilbara/12355358

Scientists say the “jury is still out” about a mysterious green glow that travelled across the sky in the remote West Australian outback early this morning.
Night workers on remote sites from Cape Lambert to Hope Downs in the Pilbara saw the bright light just before 1:00am, and many captured it on video.
There were reports of sightings as far away as the Northern Territory and South Australia, according to Glen Nagle from the CSIRO-NASA tracking station in Canberra.

“It was really a spectacular observation,” he said.

But Renae Sayers, from Curtin University’s Space, Science and Technology Centre, said it was most likely a natural object.

“It’s absolutely stunning,” she said.

“It’s a ball of green … what you are seeling is a giant flash of light, it’s almost like a ball with this gorgeous long tail.

Normally, she said, space rocks entering the atmosphere presented at a very fast and shallow angle, and fizzled out quickly.

“The reason why this is really interesting and the jury is out with our scientists, is that earlier this year we shared a paper of a grazing fireball that actually entered our atmosphere, burned 1,300km across the Australian sky and kicked back out into interstellar space, and that’s what this looked like as well.

Mr Nagle said the distinctive greenish-blue colour indicated the object had a lot of iron in it.

“Every single day, our Earth’s atmosphere is hit by about 100 tonnes of natural space debris,” he said.

Curtin University has a network of 50 cameras across southern Australia covering 3 million square kilometres of sky to try and capture fireball events in a project called Desert Fireball Network.

Project manager Ellie Sansom said it was most likely an asteroid or a meteoroid because it was bright and did not flicker too much.

About 60,000 of the meteorites have been recovered around the world, and all contain valuable information about the earliest history of the universe.

> Mr Nagle said the distinctive greenish-blue colour indicated the object had a lot of iron in it.

Sucks air in through teeth. That’;s something for me to take on board.

Perhaps. But I would bet prepared to bet that that most meteors with a lot of iron in them wouldn’t have a green glow.

Slightly change of topic. Green ball lightning is known, but it’s the rarest colour of ball lightning. The same might be true of meteors. In auroras, the green comes from excited oxygen.

mollwollfumble said:

Slightly change of topic. Green ball lightning is known, but it’s the rarest colour of ball lightning. The same might be true of meteors. In auroras, the green comes from excited oxygen.

I thought the green colour might have been from copper … ?

Spiny Norman said:

mollwollfumble said:

Slightly change of topic. Green ball lightning is known, but it’s the rarest colour of ball lightning. The same might be true of meteors. In auroras, the green comes from excited oxygen.

I thought the green colour might have been from copper … ?

That was my thought as well. I also thought that most meteors have a lot of iron in them.

“ grazing fireball that actually entered our atmosphere, burned 1,300km across the Australian sky and kicked back out into interstellar space”

Can we talk about this? How can something enter our atmosphere and “kick back out” into space?

Divine Angel said:

“ grazing fireball that actually entered our atmosphere, burned 1,300km across the Australian sky and kicked back out into interstellar space”

Can we talk about this? How can something enter our atmosphere and “kick back out” into space?

It went through the upper part of the atmosphere and was going too fast and/or at too shallow an angle to slow enough to enter the lower parts of the atmosphere.

Divine Angel said:

“ grazing fireball that actually entered our atmosphere, burned 1,300km across the Australian sky and kicked back out into interstellar space”

Can we talk about this? How can something enter our atmosphere and “kick back out” into space?

Like skipping a stone across water.

Spiny Norman said:

mollwollfumble said:

Slightly change of topic. Green ball lightning is known, but it’s the rarest colour of ball lightning. The same might be true of meteors. In auroras, the green comes from excited oxygen.

I thought the green colour might have been from copper … ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Colours

Michael V said:

Spiny Norman said:

mollwollfumble said:

Slightly change of topic. Green ball lightning is known, but it’s the rarest colour of ball lightning. The same might be true of meteors. In auroras, the green comes from excited oxygen.

I thought the green colour might have been from copper … ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Colours

ta.

Divine Angel said:

“ grazing fireball that actually entered our atmosphere, burned 1,300km across the Australian sky and kicked back out into interstellar space”

Can we talk about this? How can something enter our atmosphere and “kick back out” into space?

Basically by a) being huge and b) coming in at too shallow an angle.

https://phys.org/news/2019-12-meteor-grazing-fireball.html
Back in 2017, a meteor tore through the atmosphere over Australia. It was notable for its duration—it lasted for approximately a minute and a half. In this new effort, the researchers have found that the object was a meteor for just a short period of time—it never struck the Earth. Instead, the object headed back out into space. Such meteors are known as grazing fireballs because they only graze the Earth’s atmosphere rather than plunge through it. This is possible due to the angle at which it approaches. Like a rock that skips off the surface of a lake rather than plunging in, a meteoroid can skip off the atmosphere if its angle is very small.

Thanks Bill, Boris, DV and anyone else I missed.

Divine Angel said:

Thanks Bill, Boris, DV and anyone else I missed.

The rest of us didn’t say anything. ;)

roughbarked said:

Michael V said:

Spiny Norman said:

I thought the green colour might have been from copper … ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Colours

ta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_test#Common_elements

In flame tests, green can be boron, barium, copper, manganese, molybdenum, niobium, antimony, tellurium, tungsten, vanadium. Not normally iron or magnesium.

It would be pretty weird if an asteroid was predominantly made of copper but note that copper, in metallic form, has been found in meteorites.