A mysterious, slow-moving fireball lit up the night sky from California to Texas last week and still has not been identified.
Camera footage obtained by NBC 7 shows the brilliant ball of light slowly shoot across the sky, trailed by a bright tail over Rebecca Woods’ home in San Marco, outside of San Diego.
“Our camera is facing south and the object flew from west to east,” Woods told the outlet. “I first thought it might be a Starlink launch because this is the exact trajectory I’ve seen in previous launches but there was nothing scheduled.”
The American Meteor Society received 34 reports of a fireball on July 25 from California, Mexico and all the way to Texas.
Videos and photos of the object on the organization’s website show the blazing white ball slowly traversing the sky.
Eric Sandquist, a professor and the department chair of San Diego State’s Astronomy Department, believes it was Japanese space junk.
“The object appears to be the same one in this news story from Mexico. It is believed to be a Japanese booster rocket from a launch in 2010,” he told NBC 7. “There is a link on the page to a prediction that the rocket would de-orbit at about the time observed.”
The fireball’s west-to-east trajectory “supports the idea that it was an orbiting object that re-entered,” Sandquist said, noting that most launches go eastward to utilize Earth’s rotation.
He also said the object’s slow speed suggests that it likely was not a meteor, which would have been traveling much faster.
One New Mexico witness reported seeing the object breaking up.
San Diego police confirmed that the spectacle was not part of Comic Con, which took over the city last weekend.
