"Indigenous Australians tell lots of stories about stars falling out of the sky with a noise like thunder -- and one of the stories gave a location in the Northern Territory," said Macquarie University PhD candidate Duane Hamacher, a researcher of Aboriginal astronomy at the Department of Indigenous Studies.

"I also decided to look at known impact craters in Australia and see if they had associated dreaming stories that attributed their origins to cosmic impacts -- and some did."

Hamacher managed to locate a bowl-shaped crater at Palm Valley, around 130 miles south-west of Alice Springs.

"I searched for it on Google Earth, but when I really found something looking like a crater I couldn't believe it."

"I was very hesitant with excitement as I thought I would look like an idiot if it was just something simple -- but it wasn't."

"It was a crater."

Geological investigation of the crater has yielded physical evidence that strongly indicates its origins in a meteorite impact.

"We found shocked quartz, which is only produced by a substantial impact and its presence in the rock samples and the morphology of the structure are the major indicators that Palm Valley is a crater," said Hamacher.

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"There is no other way to explain the structure's morphology than as a cosmic impact."

"It couldn't have been erosion and there is no volcanic activity in the area."

Although some stories could be explained as simple eyewitness accounts, many meteorite impacts occurred long before known history -- indicating that Aboriginal astronomy may be more sophisticated than hitherto suspected.

"Lots of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are associated with craters, meteorites and cosmic impacts and although some craters are millions of years old and people would not have been able to witness the impact, it seems as if traditional dreaming stories know about the crater's origin," Hamacher said.

"We found stories with descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls related to places in Arnhem Land -- we assume there are more meteorite craters out there and science doesn't even know about their existence yet."