With the Perseids Meteor Shower continuing to rain into earth’s atmosphere, you may have seen more than a few objects streak across our skies this week.
But one object that entered orbit Wednesday night left many in awe across Central Oregon.
“I see this little dot kind of blink in over Black Crater, and I saw it kind of develop this soft tail like a comet. But in my mind I just kept thinking: ‘That’s not a comet. That’s not a comet,'” Tim Flanagan of Sisters said.
Several fireballs illuminated the night sky around 10 p.m.
Many took to social media to upload their pictures and videos of the object, asking what it was.
“Unlike the meteor showers we’ve been seeing the last couple days, this was multiple, streaking, almost scattering pieces of space debris, going north to south across the sky. So I whipped out my phone as fast as I could to try and capture what I was seeing,” Ryan Mick of Bend said.
According to Aerospace, Starlink Satellite 33557 re-entered earth’s atmosphere at roughly 10:11 p.m. on Wednesday.
That satellite was launched November 25th, of 2024.
“The nice thing we see with space junk coming in, or a satellite coming, is that they’ll break a part and show multiple trails behind them. A Perseid is just a single trail behind it,” director of Cascade Astronomy and Rocketry Academy Rob Grossfeld said. “Starlinks always re-enter the atmosphere. They’re happening all the time. There are websites that track that. The earth is being bombarded by space debris on a constant basis. We just had an opportunity in Bend to see it.”
Grossfeld says most space debris burns up in the atmosphere, and doesn’t impact the earth, and if it does, it often lands in the ocean.