A mysterious, slow-moving fireball lit up the night sky from California to Texas last week, but its identity has yet to be identified.
Camera footage Obtained by NBC 7 Above Rebecca Woods’ home in the San Diego suburb of San Marco, a glowing ball of light can be seen moving slowly across the sky, leaving a bright tail behind.
“Our camera was pointing south, and the object was flying from west to east,” Woods told the outlet. “This was the exact same trajectory we’d seen in previous launches, so at first we thought it was a Starlink launch, but nothing was scheduled.”
The American Meteor Society 34 reports On July 25th, a fireball was seen across California, Mexico and even Texas.
Video and photos of the object on the group’s website show a burning white ball moving slowly across the sky.
Eric Sundquist, professor and chair of the astronomy department at San Diego State University, believes it was Japanese space junk.
“The object appears to be the same as the one seen in the Mexican news article. It appears to be a Japanese booster rocket that was launched in 2010,” he told NBC7. “The page has a link to a prediction that the rocket will deorbit around the time it was observed.”
The fireball’s west-to-east trajectory “supports the idea that it was an object orbiting the Earth and then re-entering,” Sundquist said, noting that many launches use the Earth’s rotation to move eastward.
He also said the object’s slow speed made it likely not a meteor, which it would have been traveling much faster.
One witness in New Mexico reported seeing the object disintegrate.
San Diego police confirmed the event was not part of Comic-Con, which took the city by storm last weekend.
