The Tasman Sea is located, as the name implies, in Tasmania - yes, that same place where the Tasmanian Devil comes from (which looks nothing like the cartoon). Tasmania is an island that is located just southeast of Australia. Recently, cameras captured a meteor exploding there in that region

A research vessel operated by the Australian National Science Agency (CSIRO) was sailing through the region and spotted a meteor streaking across the sky. The object soon became a fireball, exploding in the skies above the ocean.

"What we saw in the analysis of the live feed footage surprised us, the size and brightness of the meteor was incredible," John Hooper, a CSIRO Voyage manager who is on board the ship, said in a statement. "The meteor crosses the sky directly in front of the ship and then breaks off - it was incredible to watch the footage and we were lucky enough to have captured it all on the ship's live feed."he says.

Watch the meteor explode

The footage occurred in black and white, but the explosion is green. This is the video of the meteor exploding:

(CSIRO).

Although it is quite beautiful to see, it is quite common, actually. But what stands out, in some cases, is the size of the fireball that forms, depending on the size and composition of the object. Burning rocks in the atmosphere also stand out in meteor showers, as there is a larger than normal flow of space rocks.

However, even on other days when there are no meteor showers, there are some beautiful meteors, such as this one. "More than 100 tonnes of natural space debris enters the Earth's atmosphere every day," explains Glen Nagle, who works from CSIRO's astronomy and space science arm.

Sometimes some impressive cases arise. Most of the planet's surface is oceanic. Therefore, it is normal to assume, statistically, that considerably more meteors fall above the ocean than above the continents. In other words, we do not see or know about most of the large explosions that occur - which are already few.

"Most of it goes unnoticed when it occurs in an unpopulated area like the southern ocean," Nagle says.

When we see nothing

What if I told you that in 2018 a meteor exploded on Earth causing a 173 kiloton blast, 10 times stronger than the Little Boy nuclear bomb explosion, the one the United States dropped on Japan at the end of World War II in 1945? That's right, no one saw it. It fell above the Bering Sea, which separates Alaska from Siberia.

But the explosion was very strong. It would not go unnoticed. At least 16 monitoring stations around the world detected the object, which entered the Earth's atmosphere at an angle of almost 90 degrees. Estimates show that it was about 10 meters in diameter and had a mass approaching 1400 tons. They only confirmed it when they found it in images from the Japanese satellite Himawari-8.trail looks small, but it's very big:

(Himawari/JMA/Simon Proud).

It then became the third largest meteor explosion in recent times - it only loses out to The Tunguska Event, which occurred in Siberia in 1908. The blast was equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs and destroyed 1,200 square kilometers of forest - about 8 million trees. But Siberia is a sparsely populated region. In 2013, in Chelyabinsk, also in Russia, a large meteor exploded in theatmosphere and destroyed windows, cars, as well as injuring 1200 people. This just shows how we have zero control of aggression from space.

Luckily, there are more ocean and uninhabited areas than cities covering the planet, so serious meteor strikes are quite rare. Moreover, most meteors burn up completely in the atmosphere before hitting the ground. The most dangerous ones represent only a small fraction.

With information from Space.com e CSIRO .