Australians were treated to a spectacular light show after a fireball the size of a truck shot through the sky Thursday night, CNN reported. Believed to be space junk from Russia's Soyuz rocket, it streaked across the night sky and lit up social media.
The fireball, more accurately known as "object 40077," was the third stage of the Soyuz rocket which was launched from Kazakhstan on July 8. It was witnessed hurtling around the Earth at some 18,000 mph, or almost 29,000 kilometers per hour. "This is part of launching rockets -- bits and pieces have to come down and we just happened to have one come down quite spectacularly over the top of Australia," Brian Schmidt, a professor of astronomy at the Australian National University, told Agence France-Presse.
"What you're seeing in that fireball is it slowing down really fast. It's belly-flopping on the world's atmosphere at 18,000 miles an hour. That really hurts," said Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, adding that around 1,000 of these types of space junk have re-entered orbit since the start of the space age.
On late Thursday, people flocked to Twitter or called radio stations to describe the "amazing" fireball that crossed Australia's eastern states, particularly Melbourne, in a south-west to north-east direction. "It was so fast and then it just slowed and drifted down ... with an enormous trail of light," a listener told Melbourne radio station 3AW. "You could see as it was coming down close to the ground it seemed to be spluttering and breaking up. It was absolutely fantastic."
Another witness said she saw "an amazing bright light with a really long, white tail with flecks of red." However, some witnesses contacted the police, fearing the flame, which reportedly lasted up to 20 seconds, was a burning plane about to crash.
Schmidt claimed it was likely that the object was a piece of space junk rather than a meteor since it was travelling slowly and in a "very grazing trajectory across the sky", rather than at a steep angle. "Those are the things you would expect from something that's orbiting the Earth," added Schmidt, who shared the Nobel Physics Prize with U.S. researchers in 2011. "This fireball came down exactly on the orbit of this third-stage rocket, which had been predicted to enter the Earth last night Australian time, so it all holds together."
Meanwhile, it would be difficult to project where the "solid metal pieces" that survived re-entry into the atmosphere could have landed, Melbourne-based astronomer Alan Duffy said. "The smallest gust of wind as it falls can send these pieces off by many kilometers, making it unlikely we'll ever know where this ended up," Duffy said.
