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Nicaraguan officials have appealed for witnesses to a meteorite strike that left a 12m-wide crater near Managua's international airport on Saturday night.
Residents reported a loud boom as the meteorite crashed but scientists said no one had come forward who had seen the streak that a speeding space rock would score across the sky.
"I was sitting on my porch and I saw nothing, then all of a sudden I heard a large blast," Jorge Santamaria told the Associated Press. "We thought it was a bomb because we felt an expansive wave."
A government spokeswoman, Rosario Murillo, said a team formed to study the event believed the 5m-deep crater was left by a relatively small meteorite that appeared to have come off an asteroid passing close to Earth. She said international scientists had been called in to help with the investigation.
The meteorite may have been a fragment of a house-sized asteroid nicknamed Pitbull, which hurtled past Earth on Sunday night at a distance of 40,000km.
Site where the meteorite crashed
Dan Brown, an astronomer at Nottingham Trent University, said that although the Nicaraguan impact occurred 12 hours before Pitbull passed Earth, Central America was facing the right direction for the strike to be a fragment associated with the asteroid.
Pieces of the asteroid could have broken off during collisions with other rocks in the asteroid belt or through heating when the asteroid swung around the sun.
"It certainly makes absolute sense that people surrounding the impact site heard a loud boom. But a flash of light or bright object should also have been observed before that," Brown said.
Humberto Saballos, a volcanologist with the Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies, told the AP it was unclear whether the meteorite disintegrated or was buried on impact at the site. The meteorite could have exploded in the air and produced a shockwave that made the crater, or struck the ground and left small fragments embedded in the soil.
Witness accounts of the meteorite strike would help scientists confirm when the meteorite struck and the path it took – information that could link it to Pitbull or rule out the asteroid as the source of the rock. Wilfried Strauch, an adviser to the Institute of Territorial Studies, said it was strange no one had reported a streak of light. "We have to ask if anyone has a photo or something."
If investigators can find remnants of the meteorite in the crater, then its chemical makeup could be compared with measurements of the larger asteroid taken from ground-based telescopes.
"It's a wake-up call that we need to understand more about the flight paths of asteroids," Brown said.
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