The north Queensland sky was briefly set alight on Saturday night as a meteor blazed through the atmosphere, exploded, and came to earth with a tremendous boom. Most meteors are made of stony chondrite, but the greenish colour prior to impact in this case was most likely caused by overheating of iron and nickel fragments as the rock broke apart before it hit the ground. Meteors crash through the Earth’s atmosphere like this every month or so, Tucker said, but as most of the surface area of the Earth was uninhabited, most of them went unheeded by the general public