{"id":301920,"date":"2025-12-06T15:17:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T15:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/301920\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T15:17:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T15:17:09","slug":"strange-pillar-of-light-linked-to-chinese-rocket-test-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/301920\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange pillar of light linked to Chinese rocket test flight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A glowing streak spotted in the sky on Thursday morning was most likely caused by a Chinese rocket, experts say.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Witnesses reported a bright, linear trail visible around dawn and dusk from several locations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the US, said: &#8220;It was definitely the Chinese Zhuque-3 rocket making its first test flight. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It passed over the UK and northern Europe at around 05:00 GMT at the end of its first orbit, following launch from China at 04:02 GMT. Chinese upper stages have been previously observed to make long, linear propellant-dump trails.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A glowing streak spotted in the sky on Thursday morning was most likely caused by a Chinese rocket,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-301920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}