Bangs, tremors and even "explosions" were reported to GeoScience Australia (GA) in Victoria and southern NSW as four meteors were believed to have entered the Earth's atmosphere on Wednesday morning.

Originally the cause of the reports was a mystery to GA, after their equipment did not detect anything on the ground.

"It is somewhat of a mystery, normally an earthquake felt over many, many tens of kilometres ... would register on those instruments," Seismologist Dr Steve Tatham said.

But astronomer Dr Brad Tucker at the Australian National University's Mt Stromlo Observatory in Canberra said their telescope tracking system picked up an object entering the Earth's atmosphere.

"It appears to be there's a few largish meteors running into the earth's atmosphere, when we say large, we think on the order of say a soccer ball or a football," Dr Tucker said.

"Normally when we think of a meteor, we actually think shooting star - something very bright that lasts for a few seconds.

"Those things that we see at night are the size of grains of sand, dust, pebbles, little small rocks, so they just burn up for a few seconds and then they're gone."

Dr Tucker said the objects were probably from a larger meteor in space that collided with something, causing a few fragments to break off and crash into the Earth.

He likened the impact of the collision with the Earth's atmosphere to a person "belly flopping" into a pool of water.

"Normally the thing is small enough just to go straight through the water - straight through the atmosphere - and burn up smoothly and not have any problems," he said.

"But in this case, because it's so relatively large, it can't quite cleanly pass through the atmosphere, just as we can't cleanly pass through the water, and it does a smack into the atmosphere.

"So what's really happening is kind of like a bomb going off in the atmosphere - and this case it was a series of bombs related to what we believe were four different meteors hitting the Earth."

He said the initial explosion of the meteors entering the atmosphere would have caused a bright flash, before the meteors were further broken up.

"If this has happened at night, it would have been truly spectacular," he said.

"You would have seen four large booms at once, then a slew in the order of 30 or 40 different fragments burning up into bright fire balls into the Earth," he said.

'Once in a lifetime' experience captured on dash cam

Gus Pegel, who was driving in Melbourne's east at the time, captured a small flash in the sky with his dash cam.

Dr Tucker said it probably showed one of the fragments breaking from the meteor.

He said while meteors fall into the Earth's atmosphere quite often, it was rare to see them during the day.

"The Earth is 70 per cent water so naturally it's going to occur more over water than land," he said.

"And a lot of the land is uninhabited, so things happen in places like Antarctica."

He said those people who saw the initial explosion of the meteors hitting the atmosphere had a "truly once in a lifetime" experience.

"They're are unlikely to ever see that again," he said.

Dr Tucker said once the reports started coming in of the sightings, scientists at Mt Stromlo went to check if they had detected anything.

"GeoScience Australia said they didn't detect it on the ground ... so we know that it wasn't too large to have more of a metal chunk landing on the Earth," he said.

"Once we heard reports of it we went and checked databases and telescope tracking systems ... that are trying to track man-made space junk, so orbital debris, left over rockets, screw drivers that astronauts dropped in space.

"We were able to determine it wasn't a man made object, so it pretty much had to be a meteor."