A BLAZING fireball lit up the skies over Australia before a deafening bang rattled homes and sent social media into meltdown.

The suspected meteor was spotted just before 8pm on Sunday by Victoria residents who thought they saw a blinding flash followed by a ground-shaking boom.

One shocked witness wrote on social media: “Just saw something fall from the sky near Daylesford and a huge bang. Never felt anything like it.”

Another claimed: “Hubby saw a red light falling, followed by a loud bang! The house was shaking.”

One motorist said they “nearly shat” themselves when a red lightning bolt appeared overhead, while another joked they mistook the noise for “a wombat slamming into the gate while a heavy possum ran across the roof.”

Dashcam footage shared on X shows the meteor’s brilliant trail streaking across the Melbourne night sky around 8.30pm, flaring before breaking apart in a burst of white light.

Another clip, time-stamped 7.49pm, captures the fireball blazing over Victoria, so bright it briefly lit up the landscape, before fading – moments before residents say they heard the bang.

Associate professor Michael Brown from Monash University’s school of physics and astronomy said the noise could have been a sonic boom – a rare sign the meteor came unusually close to Earth’s surface.

He explained: “That is unusual and actually quite exciting, as if those reports are accurate, probably what they were hearing was a sonic boom from the meteor.

“To be able to hear the sonic boom loudly from the ground suggests that quite a big chunk of the meteor was pretty close to the ground.

“And that possibly means there’s chunks of the meteorite actually made it down to the ground and optimistically, might be found.”

But finding them will be no small task.

“They’re not dangerous. They won’t be particularly hot or cold… but there’s a lot of rocks out there in rural Victoria, so trying to identify a meteor amongst them can be pretty tricky,” he said, adding any pieces would likely be just centimetres in size.

While the Perseid meteor shower is set to peak this week, astronomer Perry Vlahos said this was a “sporadic meteor” – a random rock from space not linked to any known shower.

“It burns out in the sky, way before hitting the ground, so it won’t be a meteorite… at this stage, we can only call it a meteor,” he said.

The event came just three days after Perth residents were wowed by another fiery visitor – a fist-sized cometary fragment slamming into the atmosphere at 21 miles per second.

That one burned up 42 miles above the ocean southwest of the city, with no fragments making it to the ground.

Experts say while these fireballs aren’t uncommon, ones bright enough to light up the sky and loud enough to shake houses are rare – and always get people talking.

Space experts say it’s not that more meteors hit Australia — it’s that the country is better set up to see, film, and recover them.

According to Curtin University’s Desert Fireball Network, Australia’s interior offers low–light, dry skies ideal for detection and adds a layer of recovery readiness in its sparse, open terrain, The Guardian reports.

Specialists also highlight Australia’s “virtually pristine” dark skies in its inland regions, plus a growing number of Dark Sky Places, as major reasons meteors are more visible here than in many other parts of the world.