The beautiful and dramatic string of lights that streaked across the sky starting after about 9:30 p.m. was the result of burning space debris reentering Earth's atmosphere, experts say.
Gerald McKeegan, an adjunct astronomer at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, wrote in an email to SFGATE that the debris was retired equipment from an old Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. "Satellites or spacecraft hardware left behind from old missions may eventually re-enter the Earth's atmosphere after many years in a slowly decaying orbit," McKeegan said. "The hardware heats up and then breaks apart high in the atmosphere, at altitudes of 25 miles or more."
The lights were seen across California, Oregon and Nevada, McKeegan said, and a brewery in Sacramento was among the first to post a video of the light display on Instagram and raise questions around what it was Friday night.
"Crazy Fireworks. This flew over the brewery tonight. What do you guys think? #UFO," the post read.
Social media exploded with theories about what the lights were: Many guessed they were meteors, while others claimed aliens.
TV news stations referred to the display as "mysterious streaks of light," but turns out they weren't that mysterious.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, quickly jumped into the conversation to debunk the UFO theories and set the record straight on Twitter.
McDowell said the space debris was obsolete Japanese communications equipment, known as the Inter-orbit Communication System-Exposed Facility, that was carried to the International Space Station on the Space Shuttle in 2009.
In operation through 2020, the equipment relayed information from the Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth. The equipment, with a mass of 310 kilograms (683 pounds of weight in Earth's gravity), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added.
"It orbited the Earth as space junk for 3 years, and reentered at 0430 UTC (9.30pm PDT) over California, widely observed from the Sacramento area," he wrote.
McDowell said that most of the debris likely burned up when it reentered the atmosphere, but if any small pieces made it to the ground, they likely fell near Yosemite National Park.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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March 21, 2023 at 01:24AM
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'Mysterious streaks of light' over California weren't that mysterious - SFGATE
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