The sky over Northern California was lit up late last week by debris from the International Space Station (ISS) that entered Earth’s atmosphere.
Of course, many people who watched this fascinating spectacle thought that it could be the debris of an alien spaceship, meteorites or even some technological devices from China.
But as Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics clarified, it was actually part of the former ICS-EF communications device that was ejected from the aforementioned ISS in 2020.
“What you’re seeing are some really very small objects that are very high up releasing a lot of energy and moving extremely fast,” stated renowned astrophysicist in an interview with The New York Times.
Similar “light shows” caused by some cosmic junk are said to be quite common, however, many of them go unnoticed due to the area in which they occur.
“They don’t happen in one place very often, so it’s always something new for the people watching,” McDowell noted.
