Image: Fernando Braga

There were multiple sightings of a meteor burning up over Melbourne last night.

Fernando Braga captured the below footage of the spectacle, which he thought was a meteor “exploding” from his apartment near Southern Cross Station.

• Scroll down for the remarkable footage

“It was really bright,” he told Neil Mitchell.

Senior physics lecturer at RMIT and former astronaut trainer, Dr Gail Iles, says the meteor would have been travelling at “a few kilometres a second”, but it wasn’t technically exploding.

“Because it’s travelling so fast it’s interacting with the particles in the atmosphere surrounding the Earth and it’s created this large flash,” she explained to Neil Mitchell.

“It just disintegrates.”

Press PLAY below to hear more from Gail Iles.

Press PLAY below to see the footage.