New Delhi: A bunch of glistening strips of light was seen piercing through the sky in several parts of Madhya Pradesh and Maharastra on Saturday night. The rare event was recorded by many on their mobile phone camera as well as posted online on multiple social media platforms.
While many social media users claimed the unusual sighting as a ‘meteor shower’, some including astronomer Jonathan McDowell surmise that the celestial event was actually “re-entry of a Chinese rocket stage”, which was launched in February last year.
McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, wrote in his tweet regarding the event, “I believe this is the reentry of a Chinese rocket stage, the third stage of the Chang Zheng 3B serial number Y77 which was launched in Feb 2021 – it was expected to reenter in the next hour or so and the track is a good match”.
Meanwhile, Suresh Chopade, president of Skywatch group in Nagpur said that he has been observing space-related events for the past 25 years and the event that took place on Saturday night seemed like it was related to a satellite.
“It seems like a satellite of some nation might have fallen accidentally or may have been caused to fall intentionally. It does not seem like a meteor shower or fireball,” he said.
Watch the video here:
#WATCH | Maharashtra: In what appears to be a meteor shower was witnessed over the skies of Nagpur & several other parts of the state. pic.twitter.com/kPUfL9P18R
— ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2022
As soon as several videos surfaced online, #meteor #meteorshower started trending on the microblogging site Twitter.
Rajendra Gupta, Superintendent of the 300-year-old Jiwaji Observatory in Ujjain, said, “This appears to be ulkapind (meteorites). Their fall is common.”
For the unversed, the celestial event where several meteors originate or radiate from some point in the sky is called a meteor shower. The event is caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids that enter the atmosphere of earth on parallel trajectories.
