Imagine the situation: you are in a remote location in Alaska, in a US state where, according to legend, there are more bears than bars. Its purpose is to see Northern lights, but you get an extra: a giant half-purple, half-blue ball of light appears in the sky. You don’t know what it is. Apparently, he often wonders if it was an alien entering Earth. But, of course, there is a scientific explanation for almost everything.

“The ball is bigger than the moon”

The image was taken March 29 by photographer Leslie Smallwood, a native of Fairbanks, Alaska. According to Smallwood, the ball of light had a larger diameter than the Moon and moved in a northeast-southwest direction in the Alaskan sky. “When I zoomed in, it looked like something was spinning inside the ball. And he had a little tail. It didn’t feel like a shot to the sky. It was like he was waiting in the wings,” said the photographer.

The image was also captured by the couple Ronn Murray and Marketa Murray. They are responsible for the Aurora Hunters project, a camera system that takes pictures of the sky every 45 seconds to record the auroras. Although at first it sounds like something inexplicable, there is an explanation: a Chinese missile.

Chinese rocket releases fuel

According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the time of the explosion coincides with the flight of the Chinese missile. “A Longmarch 6A rocket launched on March 29 from China put two satellites into orbit and, after calculating their orbit, passed over the region about 350 miles from the time the picture was taken,” McDowell explained. The scientist also explained that the light was caused by the ejection of fuel from the rocket. It froze in the atmosphere and reflected the sunlight.”

OUR northern lights / australis usually occurs at the poles Earth. When the solar wind brings extremely charged electron particles to Earth, they collide with our magnetic field and are deflected towards the poles, forming the famous bright dancing lights in the sky.

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