People across Europe witnessed a mysterious glowing blue spiral in the night sky this week, and scientists say they think they know what caused the dazzling formation.
The cloud-like spiral was visible to people from the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark, France and more for several minutes on Monday night before fading.
The Met Office, the U.K.’s national weather and climate service, explained in a post on X that the dazzling display was likely caused by frozen exhaust smoke from Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, a reusable, two-stage rocket designed by SpaceX for the transport of people and payloads.
“We’ve received many reports of an illuminated swirl in the sky this evening,” the Met Office wrote on Monday. “The rocket’s frozen exhaust plume appears to be spinning in the atmosphere and reflecting the sunlight, causing it to appear as a spiral in the sky.”
The SpaceX rocket launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday.
“About 8 minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, announcing its arrival with a sonic boom unique to reusable vehicles returning from space,” SpaceX shared in a post on X.
This isn’t the first time a SpaceX rocket has lit up the sky.
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Earlier this month, SpaceX’s eighth test flight of its Starship rocket ended in a late-stage explosion, leaving a barrage of blazing shrapnel visible in the skies that disrupted air traffic.
The Starship lifted off at 6:30 p.m. eastern time on March 6, with no crew on board, from a SpaceX facility in Texas.
The rocket reached nearly 150 kilometres in altitude before it ran into trouble. Ground crews lost communication with the vessel about nine-and-a-half minutes after lift-off, SpaceX confirmed.
While the exact location where the rocket came down remains unclear, the company says it launched within a designated corridor to ensure the safety of the public on the ground, at sea and in the air, claiming that any surviving debris would have fallen within a “pre-planned debris response area” and that remnants were non-toxic and would not cause harm to marine or human life.
The explosion marked the second unsuccessful launch for Musk’s space technology company this year, after the same vessel malfunctioned on Jan. 16 due to an unexpected misfiring about eight minutes into the launch.
Musk‘s company said Starship broke apart, calling it a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The rocket appeared to lift off from SpaceX’s launchpad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, but eight-and-a-half minutes into the mission, ground control announced that it had lost all communication with the ship.
Flights near the Turks and Caicos Islands were spotted diverting to avoid the debris from the explosion and footage was shared of debris falling from the sky in the area.
Musk shared a video of the debris falling, writing, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”
The spacecraft was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world, similar to previous tests. SpaceX packed the new and upgraded model with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them.
There were no astronauts on board the test flight mission and the last data received from the spacecraft indicated an altitude of 146 kilometres and a velocity of 13,245 km/h.
It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket. The mission marked the second time that SpaceX has been able to return and catch the stage booster using the launch tower.
In April 2023, green bands of light danced in the Alaska skies, resembling a galaxy for a few minutes.
The cause was excess fuel released from a SpaceX rocket that launched from California about three hours earlier.
Sometimes rockets have fuel that needs to be jettisoned, said space physicist Don Hampton, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
“When they do that at high altitudes, that fuel turns into ice,” he said. “And if it happens to be in the sunlight, when you’re in the darkness on the ground, you can see it as a sort of big cloud, and sometimes it’s swirly.”
The rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with about 25 satellites as its payload.
— with files from Global News’ Rachel Goodman and The Associated Press
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