Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
The skies of California were slashed with a sudden green streak of light on Tuesday night.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Along with the sky, social media also lit up with sights of the mysterious green flash. People quickly began to speculate whether it was a meteor, a piece of space junk, or – inevitably – aliens.
Sightings were reported around 10 p.m. local time by over 125 people, according to the American Meteor Society. This was mainly from people in southern California, although a lucky few managed to catch a glimpse as far north as central California, as south as the Mexican border, and there was even one sighting in Arizona.
Local news reported that the United States Navy released a statement saying: “...the information provided does not correlate to any of the more than 16,000 on-orbit cataloged objects tracked and listed in USSTRATOM's Satellite Catalog and the publicly available website www.space-track.org.”
It concluded: “We have determined that the reentry of a man-made object did not occur at this time.”
The most likely suspect seems to be a meteor hitting Earth’s atmosphere and burning up. Earlier this year, a confirmed meteor caused a similar huge green streak across the night sky in Ireland, coincidently on St. Patrick’s Day.
The flash was caught on the dashcam of a car in the video below. The streak can be seen around the 0:11 mark, along with some suitably epic music as a backdrop.
