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A Starlink satellite leaving a streak across a long-exposure night sky photo of the Milky Way.
Credit: Alan Dyer/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images
People in the central United States were amazed Saturday evening when they saw a bright fireball blaze across the night sky. After a few days of mystery, astronomers have reported that the fiery streak was a Starlink satellite re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.
The burning satellite was visible around 10 p.m. CST on Nov. 9. According to an interactive map on the American Meteor Society’s fireball reporting page, 36 people in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas spotted the streak and filed a report, with the earliest submitted at 9:40 p.m. and the latest sent in at 10:20. Multiple reports note that the fireball couldn’t have been a meteor, as it was “slow-moving” and didn’t vanish as quickly as witnesses expected.
(Credit for the above video: Jim Saueressig II of Burlington, Kansas, via the American Meteor Society)
“I’ve seen lots of meteors, from bright to faint, white and green, but this was the slowest, longest-lasting one yet,” one report reads. Another describes the fireball as having “exploded into many many pieces,” with one or two fragments persisting past the person’s line of sight.
These sightings were likely far more impressive in person than any video would have us believe. In what appears to be a piece of security footage, a faint streak gains a reddish color before disappearing over the horizon. Other media show the fireball breaking into pieces as it falls through the sky.
“For some reason I felt excited when I saw it,” one viewer reported. “Like a kid again. Most amazing thing I’ve seen in a really long time.”
According to renowned astronomer and space object tracker Jonathan McDowell, the fireball indeed wasn’t a meteor, but a SpaceX satellite from the massive Starlink constellation. McDowell shared Sunday morning that Starlink-4682 re-entered Earth’s atmosphere Saturday night and passed over Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma, disappearing from view in northern Texas.
In a comment under his X post, McDowell confirmed that a Starlink satellite re-enters the atmosphere almost daily, and that such frequent entries could pose a risk for the ozone layer and other aspects of the environment. Last year, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that satellites release aerosolized metals into the atmosphere when they plummet back to Earth. While health and environmental outcomes haven’t yet been linked to these aerosols, astronomers are weary of the phenomenon’s downstream effects.
“The impact for a single [satellite re-entry] event is ok,” McDowell said. “The worry is for the aggregate impact of many many reentries, and the science of that is still a matter of research (but indications are there may be a problem).”