Residents captured footage of brilliant lights streaking throughout the night time sky in southern Japan
Strange fireball-like objects had been seen flying over Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture on Wednesday night time, in line with native news experiences, with a number of eyewitnesses taking to social media to share clips of the spectacle.
A video captured by an NHK reporter round 8:30pm native time reveals the objects blazing by means of the sky close to Naha City in Japan’s southernmost area. The journalist mentioned they had been “surprised” by the sighting, noting “At first, I thought they were fireworks, but I didn’t hear any sound and they moved in a straight line.”
The Ishigakijima Astronomical Observatory, situated in Ishigaki City on the Okinawa island chain, later confirmed that it noticed a “streak of light” within the sky north of the ability at 8:33pm on Wednesday.
Various locals additionally filmed the fireballs and uploaded the footage on-line, with one video created by the Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper compiling a sequence of clips shared by residents. On social media, some observers speculated the lights had been items of a meteor or shooting stars.
However, whereas the objects have but to be recognized definitively, the Ishigakijima observatory provided a believable rationalization, noting that particles from a Chinese rocket launched final November was anticipated to re-enter Earth’s environment on the night time of May 10. The observatory predicted the house junk would “pass directly over the main island of Okinawa,” or simply north of it, NHK added.
“Fireballs and meteorites can be expected to hit the Earth vertically or obliquely, but debris from satellites and rockets are orbiting the Earth,” the observatory mentioned. “So it’s possible that [the debris] will look like this because it’s going to slowly plunge in, near parallel to the Earth, and burn up over a long period of time.”
The Eta Aquarid meteor bathe can be in progress – lively this yr between April 15 and May 27 – nonetheless the occasion’s peak already handed final week, when about 5 meteors had been anticipated to be seen within the skies over Tokyo. It is unclear whether or not the bathe would nonetheless be perceptible from Okinawa at its present stage.
(RT.com)