The bluish light that streaked across the sky above Alaska last month was most likely debris from a Chinese rocket, according to scientists.
The strange phenomenon was seen by Eyewitnesses across the state at around 5 a.m. local time. The orb moved from the northeast to the southwest.
The orb streaking in front of the northern lights was captured by an automatic camera trap. Ronn and Marketa Murray, a husband and wife duo in Fairbanks who run northern lights photography tours, take regular photos of the sky every 45 seconds so people can experience the northern lights in close to real. The orb was visible for at least four and a half minutes, according to the six photos taken by the camera.
Smallwood told KUAC that it was not like it shot across the sky.
There was no real explanation for the orb coming and going. Scientists determined that the big blue ball was the result of a photobombing Chinese rocket after analyzing the photos.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, told KUAC that he was very confident that what people saw was the dumping of fuel from a Chinese rocket stage. He said that the orb was related to the flight path of the Chinese rocket. The rocket was a two-stage Long March 6 carrier rocket that launched from Taiwan.
The leftover fuel from the rocket likely froze and spread out into a large ball that was illuminated by the sun.
Mark Conde, a physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that a glowing cloud of gas that was sunlit would look like that.
The orb seemed to be spinning because when rockets dump their fuel, they enter a controlled tumble to maintain their trajectory. The rocket would have been rotating and releasing fuel like a garden hose.
This phenomenon has happened before. According to Science Alert, an even larger blue orb was seen in the sky above Siberia in October of last year. Russian military rocket tests left frozen fuel in the area.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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