What Is a 'Space Jellyfish', And Why Was One Spotted Over The Southern US This Week?

In the early hours of Thursday, a camera in Waycross, Georgia, saw an object streaking through the sky.

Chris Combs, a professor of aerodynamics and mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said that the object looked like a space jellyfish.

It was a rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that launched the space jelly, and it was south of the camera.

Dozens of rockets leave the launchpad at Kennedy every year, but few of them could be mistaken for a bug in the sky. What happened here?

It is a combination of physics and timing.

SPACE JELLYFISH

From today's SpaceX launch. Beautiful pic.twitter.com/98mzIGHDOm

— Chris Combs (@DrChrisCombs) May 6, 2022

The long, blobby body of the jellyfish is simply exhaust leaving the rocket engine nozzle.

The pressure difference between inside and outside the nozzle is what causes the exhaust to take on a bulbous shape.

In this case, the exhaust leaving the nozzle is under-expanded, meaning the gas is at a higher pressure than the ambient air around it.

The rocket exhaust drops its own pressure when it leaves the nozzle to match the ambient pressure in the atmosphere.

In under-expanded exhaust you get expansion fans at the nozzle exit to decrease pressure and match the background.

The blob is explained by that. But what about the light?

"This is much simpler to square, and it just comes down to timing," said Combs.

Light from the sun illuminating up the exhaust plume came from just over the horizon, after the rocket launch in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday.

Perfect timing is equal to space jellyfish. An equation for a high-altitude spectacle.

If you want to see a real space jellyfish, you need to look further into space.

Astronomers recently looked at an object with a radio telescope and saw a ghost in the sky.

Live Science previously reported that the big jelly in the sky is the result of a large gas explosion from a gaggle of ancient black holes.

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The article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.