New Zealand stargazers were left puzzled and awed by strange, spiraling light formations in the night sky on Sunday night.
At about 7:25pm, Alasdair Burns, a stargazing guide on Stewart Island, also called Rakiura, received a text from a friend saying to go outside and look at the sky.
He went out and saw a huge, blue spiral of light amid the darkness.
“It looked like an enormous spiral galaxy, just hanging there in the sky,” Burns said. “Quite an eerie feeling.”
“We quickly banged on the doors of all our neighbors to get them out as well. And so there were about five of us, all out on our shared veranda looking up and just kind of, well, freaking out just a little bit,” he said.
The country’s stargazing and amateur astronomy social media groups lit up with people posting photographs and questions about the phenomenon, which was visible from most of the South Island. Theories abounded, from UFOs to foreign rockets to commercial light displays.
The reality was likely a little more prosaic, said Richard Easther, a physicist at Auckland University, who called the phenomenon “weird but easily explained.”
Clouds of that nature sometimes occur when a rocket carries a satellite into orbit, he said.
“When the propellant is ejected out the back, you have what’s essentially water and carbon dioxide that briefly forms a cloud in space — that’s illuminated by the sun,” Easther said.
“The geometry of the satellite’s orbit and also the way that we’re sitting relative to the sun — that combination of things was just right to produce these completely wacky looking clouds that were visible from the South Island,” he said.
Easther said the rocket in question was likely the Globalstar launch from SpaceX, which the company sent into low-earth orbit from Florida on Sunday.
Burns had guessed the spiral was likely a rocket, having read about a similar phenomenon in 2009, when a Russian missile launch created huge blue spirals over Norway.
“None of us had ever seen anything like that before. It was spectacular,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS