'Whole house shook': Brisbane residents rocked by 'boom' in night sky

A number of Brisbane residents have been confused and stunned by flashes and explosions in the sky.

Photographer Craig Turton snapped a photo at North Pine Dam, north of Brisbane’s CBD, on Saturday night.

He shared an image of a flashing light in the sky on Instagram.

“I felt the shockwave a while after it disappeared,” Mr Turton wrote.

A resident of Ipswich, about 76km south of where Mr Turton took his photo, wrote their “whole house shook”.

A woman living in Peregian on the Sunshine Coast claims she saw it too.

“Awesome shot,” she wrote.

“Glad you solved the mystery for me. I've never seen anything like that before. Pretty exciting!”

Jac Wil-in from Bundamba in Ipswich told the ABC she thought it was a “little earthquake”.

“I heard three booms in quick succession and the house shook,” she said.

“Set all the dogs off in the street.”

Others claimed to have seen the flashing light from NSW.

It turns out it was a meteor.

The meteor is likely due to the "Taurid Swarm", a cloud of debris left over from a massive comet that is thought to have been responsible for cataclysmic collisions in the past, such as the notorious Tunguska event in Russia.

Two thousand square kilometres of Siberian forest was flattened by a suspected meteor during that incident in June 1908.

The Earth passes close to the Taurid Swarm twice a year, with increased meteor activity in June/July and October.

But we're currently the closest we've been to the swarm since 1975, with astronomers using the opportunity to study the debris cloud for any potential objects that could be a risk to the Earth in the future.

With AAP

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