While searching for “shooting stars” from the Perseid Meteor Shower, the Stargazers in most of the United States have recently been treated to a surprising surprise: a giant spiral of ghostly white light. And we know what phenomenon they saw, but experts are not 100% sure of that exact oiling.
At 10:30pm on Tuesday (August 12th), faint light appeared in the skies in parts of the US and Canada, growing quickly and spreading into a huge, lamina vortex. After that, we sailed through the sky for about 10 minutes before making it unsuck. It was found in at least 10 states, including Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio and Nebraska.
Photographer Joshua Tom took a shot of etheric views at Yerks Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin (see above).
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The spiral consisted of rocket fuel discarded from a spacecraft preparing to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. In this type of operation, the fuel freezes into a cloud of small crystals that reflect sunlight on the planet’s surface, and shines in the night sky until the crystals dissipate and become invisible to the naked eye. The rest of the rocket usually spins before the fuel is released. This causes the resulting cloud of crystals to form a helical shape.
Related: 10 Strange Phenomena Lighting the Sky (and their Scientific Explanations)
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SpaceWeather.com suggests that the spiral was caused by the United Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket launched by Cape Canaveral, Florida at 8:56pm on Tuesday.
However, it was later revealed that one of the European Space Agency’s Arian 6 rockets had been released from the spaceport in Guiana, France just 19 minutes ago, and eventually released a European weather satellite into orbit around Earth. This caused confusion as to which rockets caused the spiral.
“There’s a lot of debate about what we were witnessing geometrically where this came from and what’s going on, so I’m not speculating about what it is,” Bush told Spaceweather.com.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has been tracking rocket launches for more than 30 years, told ABC News that he considers the Arian 6 rocket to be the most likely candidate based on the trip. However, it is not yet completely clear which rocket caused the spiral.
With the number of rocket launches increasing dramatically, sparkling spirals and similar light shows have become more common in recent years.
Most of these sparkling structures are called “Space x Spirals” because they are caused by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. One of the most recent examples was a huge vortex that lit up parts of the UK and Europe in March.
Other impressive SpaceX spirals include the ultra-rare “horned” spirals that appeared in Europe in May 2024. A large white vortex that appeared in the Arctic in March 2024. The impressive blue structure shining along with Auroras in April 2023. This phenomenon was discovered again in January 2023 by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii in April 2022.
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