According to a report, several residents in the Buleleng regency of Bali, Indonesia, said they heard an explosion that was accompanied by tremors that shook their windows on the 24th of January. Indonesia’s National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (Lapan) has also stated that residents claimed to have spotted a glowing trail in the sky.
The institute has noted that its own monitoring system for artificial objects and space debris had not detected any such object passing over or falling into Indonesian territory at the time of the incident. Given these circumstances, the loud boom has since been attributed to the phenomenon of an exploding meteor.
On the other hand, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) stated that it had recorded a tremor equivalent to an earthquake with a magnitude of 1.1 on one of its seismographs in the Balinese city of Singaraja.
BMKG’s coordinator for earthquake and tsunami mitigation that is Daryono said that no-fault activity had been recorded, however, despite the seismic event lasting for roughly 20 seconds. Echoing Lapan, he said that the agency had also received claims of Buleleng residents witnessing an object in the sky. He also added, “It likely exploded in the air, so people just got the shockwave”.
International Astronomical Union (IAU), had not announced any exposure to a potentially dangerous asteroid. In addition, only three near-earth asteroids that had a diameter of fewer than 100 meters were detected on the date of the explosion, all of which are currently at a distance several times the distance of the moon from the Earth.
Sources: Tempo.Co