Fireballs spraying across the night sky have set off a space mystery after Californians across the state filmed the wild scene Thursday night.
Locals recorded as what appeared to be space debris rained down over Northern California for several seconds.
Videos posted online by residents in Auburn, Carmichael Orangevale, Rancho Cordova, Roseville, Stockton, and Yuba City all captured the moment as clusters of golden fireballs streaked across the sky.
Several smaller pieces seemed to trail much larger fireballs, as one parent could be heard telling their child this was not a fireworks display.
The mystery into what was breaking up in the atmosphere grew larger after theories of a meteor and failed space launch were debunked.
Typically, meteors breaking up in the atmosphere can only be seen for a few seconds, appearing like shooting stars.
Moreover, the timing of the fireballs appearing over the US took place at 10:45pm ET, approximately two hours before a successful rocket launch delivering Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites into orbit.
ABC10 chief meteorologist Monica Woods theorized that: ‘This could be space debris.’
Residents across Northern California witnessed several fireballs in the sky Thursday night
The mysterious lights are believed to be space debris re-entering Earth’s atmosphere
Woods added that it’s still early to rule out a meteor or some type of space launch at this time.
However, the pattern of the fiery streaks took the debris northward as it burned up over California.
The Starlink rocket that launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base was on a polar orbit mission to deploy satellites southward.
That means it wouldn’t have produced the northward-moving debris visible even if the rocket did blow up.
Additionally, a separate SpaceX launch took place early Thursday morning, lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
So, both the time and location of this launch would make it unlikely to be the mysterious lights seen on the West Coast.
‘Saw this in the South Bay! It was HUGE! Thought it was a rocket crashing!’ one person said on social media.
Bay Area meteorologist Rob Mayeda is convinced that the object was an older SpaceX rocket that burned up over the Pacific Ocean.
Theories of a meteor or a failed SpaceX launch were quickly debunked online by meteorologists
The new-generation SpaceX ship launched from Texas in mid-January and successfully flew for around eight minutes, with the teams’ second breathtaking booster catch, before contact was lost
‘Yes, that was space junk spotted in our Bay Area skies this evening,’ Mayeda wrote on TikTok. ‘Orbiting space junk tends to move more slowly and can be easily followed across the sky as the materials burn up on reentry.’
On X, one person theorized that the space debris was pieces of Starlink-1586, a rocket launched by SpaceX in August 2020.
Scientists have noted that recent solar activity has sped up satellite decay, contributing to more frequent reentries.
According to one study in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, the sun’s storms heat up the upper atmosphere, making it denser, which slows down satellites and causes them to drop sooner, sometimes by miles per day.
Thursday’s light show looked eerily similar to a SpaceX rocket explosion in January scattered burning debris across the Caribbean and causing commercial air traffic to avoid the area.
Right now, there are about 19,000 pieces of space debris in Earth’s orbit that the US is tracking, not counting the satellites still working.
Experts think there could be over half a million smaller pieces too small to track easily.
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