Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in California’s Sacramento area Friday night. St. Patrick’s Day revelers posted videos of the surprising sight on social media, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
The 40-second video was shot by Jaime Hernandez, who was at the King Cong Brewing Company in Sacramento for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration. He began filming it when someone in the group noticed the lights.
“Mainly, we were in shock, but amazed that we got to witness it,” Hernandez was quoted by AP as saying. “None of us had ever seen anything like it.”
The brewery owner posted Hernandez’s video to Instagram, asking if anyone could solve the mystery.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that he’s 99.9 per cent confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.
McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell said in an interview with The Associated Press.
McDowell said the spectacular light show in the sky were flaming bits of wreckage. He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour.
