“It was as if God was trying out a new arc welder …”

This was just one of the many ways in which people described what they saw last Saturday night at around eleven, when a ball of fire streaked across the night sky, literally turning night into day.

Immediately following the event, reports streamed in from as far south as Pretoria and Johannesburg, with residents north of the Soutpansberg saying the bright light was followed by a huge double bang which caused windowpanes to vibrate and plaster to fall off walls. Unfortunately, most Louis Trichardt residents missed the spectacle due to the overcast conditions, although some say they only saw what looked like lightning.

Turns out it was a meteor and, based on eyewitness accounts, it was speculated that the meteor impacted near Pontdrif.

The news of a possible meteor strike for the Soutpansberg caused much excitement, with some residents even volunteering to go look for the meteorite. Later, however, it turned out that the meteor might have impacted in Zimbabwe.

“I think it is highly likely it hit the ground somewhere north of our borders,” was the comment from Tim Cooper, Director of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa’s Comet & Meteor Section. He said that the most northerly sighting came from north of Gweru, Zimbabwe.

Local amateur astronomer and chairman of the Soutpansberg Astronomy Club, Kos Coronaios was also very excited about Saturday’s meteor event.

As to what exactly people had seen, Kos says that even when a particle as small as a grain of sand enters the atmosphere, it heats up as a result of friction and may become visible before burning up.

“The resulting streak is known as a meteor. A lot of the reports from the south indicated the sky turning greenish or bluish as apposed to the white light residents of far northern Limpopo saw.

“The difference in colour sightings could be attributed to the composition of the meteor as it burns up in its decent. As soon as it impacts, it is known as a meteorite,” Kos explained.

The question on everybody’s minds is surely to be how big the meteor was. Cooper estimates its size as that of a football, with a magnitude of -18. To give our readers an idea of how bright Saturday night’s meteor sighting was, a full moon shines at a magnitude of -12 and the sun at a whopping magnitude of -26. Saturday’s meteor was therefore pretty bright.

Are such events uncommon for the Soutpansberg? Apparently not.

“The earth is bombarded by thousands of particles daily. The problem is we don’t see it because it occurs during the day or when we are indoors at night or asleep. Most meteors also burn up in the atmosphere,” said Kos.

The largest known meteorite to hit Southern Africa, called the Hoba West meteorite, came down near Grootfontein in Namibia over 80 000 years ago. Fragments from the meteorite were recovered, totalling more than 20 tons, with the meteorite itself weighing around 60 tons.

“To give you an idea of the crater size: a meteor as big as 10 kilometres wide can leave an impact crater of ±400km in diameter. The Vredefort Dome, which stretches from Johannesburg to Parys in the Free State, a diameter of between 250km en 300km, is the oldest known impact crater in the world and was created about 2.1 billion years ago,” says Kos, adding that meteors enter the upper reaches of the atmosphere at a height of approximately 80 to 120km above the earth’s surface at an approxi-mate speed of 3000km/h.