It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s just space trash!
California residents near the Bay Area were left shocked and puzzled when streaks of lights were suddenly spotted in the sky during Friday’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration.
Viral video of the phenomenon had many quickly jumping on the idea of UFOs or another one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites launching, but famed astronomer Jonathan McDowell said it was nothing more than space junk burning up in the atmosphere.
McDowell, of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the lights were caused by debris tossed from the International Space Station in 2020, which remained in orbit for years before finally crashing.
“It probably almost completely burnt up during re-entry, but any small surviving debris may have, at a guess, reached the Yosemite area,” McDowell tweeted in his explanation.
The expert said the trash was specifically a 689-pound Japanese communications device launched back in 2009 to attach to the International Space Station.
But eight years later, its coordinating satellite was retired, with the comms device then becoming obsolete and getting detached from the station.
McDowell said the burning trash event over California is not uncommon due to the large amount of orbital debris around the world.
“I get a report like this from somewhere in the world every couple months,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “They’re rare in any one place, but they’re common on a global scale.”
More than 200 pieces of space debris re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere every year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to the Space-Track, which tracks the locations of all objects launched into space, there are more than 19,000 pieces of “debris” orbiting around the world.
While McDowell noted that the chances of such debris crashing to the Earth in a place where people live was small, he urged authorities to take more safety precautions to avoid sending large pieces of debris into orbit.
“Every time they … launch one of these, it is sort of orbital roulette,” McDowell said. “The chances are in their favor, but not so much that I don’t worry.”
