It’s a bird! It’s an airplane! No, they are – pieces of a SpaceX rocket?
The unidentified falling objects that lit up the night sky from Oregon to Canada on Thursday appear to be Falcon 9 debris from a launch three weeks ago.
Skygazers in the Pacific Northwest noticed brilliant rays of light raining down slowly shortly before 9 p.m. local time and Thursday midnight ET. Several posted photos and videos of the celestial spectacle, marveling at whether it was a meteor shower, or worrying about whether it was something sinister, such as an aviation accident.
So what was it?
The unofficial statement from astronomers and meteorologists is that it was harmless missile debris. SpaceX, founded by Tesla TSLA,
CEO Elon Musk launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida just over three weeks ago to bring 60 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. It appears that the rocket’s top or second stage – which should reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up within an orbit or two after launch – didn’t complete its orbit as expected.
“It has been waiting for the last three weeks to fall, and we were lucky and it came right over head,” University of Washington astronomer James Davenport told local NBC affiliate KINGS.
Co-astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics also identified it as debris from the Falcon 9 rocket. He tweeted that it “failed to cause a deorbit burn and is now returning to orbit after 22 days,” noting that “its return was observed from the Seattle area.”
This led many followers to submit their own images of the unexpected light show a growing thread beneath his postMany described it as “astonishing,” although some expressed concerns early on that it was an even worse incident, such as an airplane explosion.
The Seattle National Weather Service also identified that the debris was likely from the second stage of the Falcon 9 missile, ensuring followers on Twitter that “there are currently no expected impacts on the ground in our region.”
Check out some more of the breathtaking videos below.
SpaceX has not claimed responsibility for the unexpected light show, and representatives from NASA’s SpaceX media relations department were not immediately available for comment.