A mysterious beam of light that cut across the Victoria sky on Monday night was likely the remnants of a Russian rocket launch re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, Australia’s space agency says.
The large flashing light extended across Mount Buller to the Melbourne CBD, burning up for almost a minute just after midnight before breaking up into pieces that burned brightly.
Reports of the sighting extended as far as Bendigo, two hours north of Melbourne.
“Shooting star over Melbourne, or is it a comet?” one bystander Tweeted.
“I don’t know if a meteor, comet or space junk,” wrote another.
Experts quickly assessed the light show as space junk, incinerating from friction as it hit the atmosphere at high speed.
The Australian Space Agency on Tuesday confirmed the space junk was “likely” the remnants of a Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome north of Moscow on Monday evening, which put a new global navigation satellite into orbit.
It was continuing to monitor information from the public, including social media footage, into the evening but didn’t expect any further debris to re-enter the atmosphere.
The agency was also working with government partners via the ‘Australian government space re-entry debris plan’ on any further movements.
“It is really quite extraordinary,” Professor Alan Duffy, astronomer at Swinburne University, told 3AW radio.
“It is the biggest light show I’ve ever seen, in terms of a re-entry of some kind of material from orbit.”
The rocket weighs 105 tonnes, is 25m long and was cast off at “extremely high altitude” after its fuel was expended, Associate Professor Alice Gorman from Flinders University said.
“Many Melburnians saw the rocket streaking across the sky as it broke into pieces, each one continuing to burn in a spectacular fireworks show,” she said.
Surviving parts of the rocket were planned to safely re-enter the atmosphere into the ocean off the south-east coast of Tasmania, according to the space agency, which added it would “continue to monitor the outcomes of this re-entry”.
Duffy said the light could not have come from naturally occurring space matter such as rock. The colours visible in the burning pieces of light indicated burning metals or plastics.
Natural meteors would more likely glow green or blue because of the chemical elements they are composed of, said Professor Richard de Grijs, an astrophysicist at Macquarie University.
Meteors are also far shorter events, slamming into the atmosphere at over 10km per second, said Associate Professor Michael Brown from Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy.
What an amazing sight over Richmond 💫 I don't know if #Meteor #Comet or #SpaceJunk #Melbourne pic.twitter.com/8SHbweU2qK
— Stewart Mason (@karmicstewii) August 7, 2023
The rocket was fast enough to break the sound barrier, Gorman said, explaining reports of people hearing a sonic boom and feeling houses shake.
“When the US Skylab space station fell back to Earth over Western Australia in 1979, there was also a sonic boom and farmers reported animals being agitated,” she said.
Bystander reports of hearing the light is “something extraordinary”, Duffy said.
“It means the final pieces have to be burning up just a few kilometres above the surface for the boom to actually travel to the ground.”
Professor Virginia Kilborn said it was a “spectacular, and quite unusual” sighting over Melbourne.
“The duration and brightness of the event means it was witnessed and recorded by dozens of people, as far away as Bendigo,” she said.
Kilborn said the fireball could be a meteor that had broken up as it hit the earth’s atmosphere, although the space debris theory was most likely at this stage.
This would not be the first time a stage of a Soyuz rocket entered Australia. In May 2020, an identical rocket stage from the launch of a military satellite from Plesetsk was seen burning up in the atmosphere.
anyone in melbourne know what rhat noise was? think i saw a shooting star about 5 minutes before, may be connected
— soph ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ || ERAS TOUR 17/2 (@pphoebebridgers) August 7, 2023
On Monday night, around midnight, seismic signals were identified near north-west Melbourne, according to Geoscience Australia.
Some people have connected it to the sky show, though there is no confirmation the two are related.
Jaime Andrés Alvarado Montes, a PhD candidate in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Macquarie University said sightings of space debris had “unfortunately become commonplace” as earth’s orbital traffic grew congested.
They said while the sightings didn’t cause direct harm to people, new satellite observation methods were needed to predict the paths of orbiting objects and avoid collisions.
