Mystery Solved After Fireball Lit Up the Night Sky

A blazing trail of lights spotted streaking through the night sky above Australia is thought to have been the result of space junk from a Russian rocket crashing back to Earth.

The fireball was spotted by eyewitnesses across Melbourne just after midnight local time, burning brightly for almost a minute, before breaking up into pieces, with a sonic boom also being heard by many nearby.

The Australian Space Agency posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday, saying that the lights were "likely the remnants of a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket re-entering the Earth's atmosphere."

"Launch of the Soyuz-2 rocket occurred from Plesetsk Cosmodrome earlier in the evening. According to Russian authorities the launch placed a new generation 'GLONASS-K2' global navigation satellite into orbit," it continued in a second post.

The rocket's re-entry was originally planned off the southeast coast of Tasmania.

People from around Melbourne flocked to social media, sharing videos and pictures of the fireball as it broke up in the sky.

It's also possible that the fireball was a meteor falling to Earth, and it could have been part of the Perseid meteor shower.

"Both of these theories are possible: there was a Russian rocket launch yesterday which appears to be plausible as the source of space debris," Virginia Kilborn, chief scientist at Swinburne University of Technology, said in a statement provided to Newsweek via email. "And we have the Perseids meteor showers due to peak in a few days' time. The space debris theory appears most likely at this stage - but it's a great time to get out in the night sky and look for meteors - you never know what you will see at this time of year!"

The color of the fireball appears to indicate that it was not a meteor, however: it glowed orange as it burned up, indicating incinerating metals and plastic, as would be present in a man-made rocket.

There are huge amounts of space junk in orbit around the Earth, ranging from discarded rocket pieces and defunct satellites to bits of debris broken off from other spacecraft.

"More than 15,000 satellites have been placed in Earth orbit since the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was orbited by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. That satellite re-entered after only three months," Mark Rigby, an adjunct research fellow for the Centre of Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, previously told Newsweek. "The number of satellites in Earth orbit has increased dramatically in recent years, due mainly to SpaceX and its Starlink communications satellites in Low Earth Orbit—now nearing 4,000."

There are thought to be about 36,500 pieces of space debris greater than 3.9 inches across; around 1 million pieces between 0.4 inches and 4 inches; and more than 130 million bits between 0.04 and 0.4 inches across, the European Space Agency estimated as of June 6.

This junk can be incredibly dangerous for astronauts in space stations in orbit around the Earth.

"What we call low-Earth orbit (LEO) is the volume of space that is easiest to reach by even emerging space nations and cubesat enthusiasts alike, and so the chances of a piece of space junk falling back to Earth are increasing year on year," Richard de Grijs, an astrophysicist at Macquarie University and executive director of the International Space Science Institute–Beijing, China, said in a statement.

"Astronauts on their way to or at the International Space Station or, for that matter, those travelling to Tiangong, the Chinese Space Station, are more and more at risk of being hit by random bits of junk. Even tiny specks of paint flying at high orbital speeds could have a devastating impact and leave gaping holes in our space capsules, despite their thick metal walls."

The debris may also pose a risk to those of us back on Earth too, as objects in orbit eventually fall back down to the planet below due to air resistance with the extremely thin atmosphere.

"While recent events like the one in Melbourne do not directly threaten human lives, it is important to develop new satellite observation methods, like daytime monitoring, and ground-based satellite tracking sensors," Jaime Andrés Alvarado Montes, a researcher at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences Macquarie University, said in a statement.

"Innovative approaches for detecting, identifying, and predicting the paths of groups of orbiting objects are also necessary. These efforts will greatly improve our awareness of space conditions and debris tracking, helping us better anticipate the movement of objects that could potentially harm the technology we rely on both on Earth's surface and in outer space."

This comes only a few weeks after a chunk of a rocket was found washed up on a beach in Western Australia. It was later identified as debris from the third stage of a polar satellite launch vehicle operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation.

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