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A Chinese rocket breaking into small fiery pieces on re-entry was the likely cause of bright lights in the sky that alarmed some Australians this week, astronomers have said.
The rocket's re-entry to Earth's atmosphere caused streaks of light to dash across the sky over parts of Western Australia in the early hours of Monday morning.
Glen Brough, who lives in the town of Broome, said he and his partner had initially thought the bright lights were missiles. "The sky was just lit up, completely lit up," he told Australian network ABC.
Brough added that the lights were accompanied by booming sounds that caused an "eruption" of barking among the town's dogs.
"Probably a minute later we just heard these massive big booms," he told 10 News First Perth. "You could hear [them] from quite a mile away."
Astronomers have allayed concerns that the lights were missiles or anything else sinister. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is an expert on the topic of space debris.
McDowell told ABC that the lights seen by Australians were likely debris from part of a Chinese Long March 3 rocket that had been launched last summer to deliver a satellite into orbit.
He said he had tracked the rocket's path using public information supplied by the United States Space Command and the rocket's path would have taken it over Broome and across northern Australia. Both the timing and direction of the lights observed this week match up with this, he said.
McDowell's comments were echoed by Greg Quicke, a Broome-based astronomer, who told the Australian network that the debris looked like space junk based on the slow pace at which it seemed to move across the sky, as seen in video footage posted online.
"If they're meteors, they're much faster than that," Quicke said.
It's not the first time this year that rocket debris has caused alarm. Two incidents have been reported in India in recent months, apparently caused by rockets not disintegrating fully on re-entry.
On April 2, a 40kg (88lb) metal ring was found to have thumped into the ground in the village of Ladbori, startling locals. The ring and other objects were found on the same day as several eyewitnesses in India's Maharashtra region reported streaks of light that moved slowly across the sky.
On May 12, residents in several parts of Gujarat's Anand district discovered scattered bits of debris after hearing loud thuds.
In both cases, McDowell said he believed the debris was from Chinese rocket stages that had been launched several months earlier.
