Global Courant 2023-04-18 07:52:48
A mysterious swirl of light in the night sky over parts of Alaska, Yukon and the NWT over the weekend was so strange and striking to those who saw it that it even managed to briefly eclipse the aurora borealis.
But the spectacular phenomenon has a very terrestrial explanation: It was apparently a cloud of unused fuel from a SpaceX rocket.
“We had no idea what was going on – ‘Oh my god, are we seeing a UFO? Or what’s happening?'” recalled Talia MacDonald, who saw it in the wee hours of Saturday morning on the remote Dempster Highway in northern Yukon.
“It was a little scary because we were the only ones on the highway.”
MacDonald and her partner were driving north toward Inuvik, NWT, at about 3 a.m. Saturday when they spotted it. They were near Eagle Plains, Yukon, at the time, and MacDonald was suddenly awakened by her partner, who was driving.
“He was like, ‘You have to look at this because I feel like I’m hallucinating,'” MacDonald said.
“Paul thought he was tripping because he had been driving for seven straight hours at that point.”
He wasn’t hallucinating. MacDonald also noticed the trippy sight – a bright bluish-white spiral of light that seemed to get stronger and brighter for a moment before disappearing. MacDonald thought it was visible for maybe two minutes. That was long enough for them to stop their vehicle and take some pictures.
“It was kind of spooky, because we were the only ones on the highway,” MacDonald said. (Talia MacDonald)
They wondered if it was somehow related to the Northern Lights, which MacDonald says got “pretty wild” at the time.
SpaceX rocket, says physicist
But according to Don Hampton, a physicist at the University of Alaska, it had nothing to do with the aurora borealis. He says the bright spectral vortex has a more Earthbound origin – a SpaceX rocket.
SpaceX is a private company that designs, builds and launches rockets and their payloads into space. It was founded in 2002 by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Hampton was asleep when the vortex was observed over parts of Alaska, but he learned all about it from Alaskan aurora watchers the next day. He also saw images made by the university’s aurora camera at the Poker Flat Research Range.
“I’ve seen a few before, so I thought it must be a launch,” Hampton said.
It wasn’t long before he learned that a SpaceX rocket had launched a few hours earlier from a base in California and would have been on its second orbit, over Alaska, around the time people saw the spiral.
This has got to be one of the coolest sights, no doubt — pic. twitter.com/jhno8zK6TW
“So once I saw that, I said, yeah, that’s probably what that was,” Hampton said.
He explains the spiral as a vapor of unused fuel ejected from the rocket and visible under the right conditions.
“Very often, when they’re done with their mission, they’ll eject some of their propellant. And when that goes out into space and the sun shines on it, you can see that in the sky when you’re (in the) dark on the ground,” said Hampton.
“So we were just at the right time, in the right place in Alaska to see it.”
