Watch: Meteorite soars through the skies above Buenos AiresAn intense bright white light was spotted fly through the skies of Argentine capital of Buenos Aires on Thursday night
Video of what appeared to be a shooting meteorite in the skies above a suburb in Argentina's capital, emerged on Friday.
The footage, filmed by local resident Claudio de Simone on Thursday evening, shows a ball of fiery white light moving quickly behind clouds in the night sky in Buenos Aires.
Residents in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Entre Rios also took to social media to report seeing an intense white light, with a long trail, moving through the sky over their neighbourhoods, according to local media.
An official from the government-run planetarium in Buenos Aires told the state-run news agency Telam, that based on images he saw, he concluded the intense white light was a meteorite.
Bloody Creek crater scientists find more meteorite hitsSeveral 'impact sites' discovered at 'outrageously rare' site
A meteorite plunging to earth thousands, if not millions of years ago, likely splintered into pieces before smashing into the ground, according to Ian Spooner, a professor of earth and environmental science at Acadia University. The largest crater, more than 400 metres across, was probably created by a chunk larger than a house.
"It would have scared the socks off of anybody or anything that was in the area," Spooner told CBC Radio's Mainstreet. "It would have had a huge shock wave. You probably wouldn't have even seen it; you'd be dead. What's particularly unusual about the Bloody Creek crater, and others to the north of it, is they are ellipses. Spooner says this means the meteorite hurtled down at a 15 degree angle with the earth, but somehow made it through the atmosphere without burning up.
"We've been doing some pretty fancy mathematics on the shape of [the crater]," he says. "It's like nothing else on earth. It's perfect. It's a perfect ellipse.
"This is outrageously rare, this feature."
The first crater was discovered by George Stevens, a retired Acadia University geologist. He stumbled upon it while reviewing aerial photographs taken in 1977, before the Bloody Creek area was dammed and turned into a reservoir. What he saw was a perfect ellipse seemingly etched into the ground.
He never published his findings in a peer reviewed journal. Instead, he left a box of research to Spooner who, with a team of scientists, took on the project of figuring out the Bloody Creek mystery.
One aspect that's caused considerable controversy is the age. Spooner says their research shows the meteorite likely struck between three million and 10,000 years ago.
If it was more recent, Nova Scotia would have been populated at the time. Some of those people would have witnessed the meteorite and probably died, Spooner says.