Screenshot from a video of the fireball reported to the American Meteor Society.
Alli Ortega
On Saturday night, dozens of people spotted a fiery object burning and breaking up, creating several streaks across the night sky just after 11 p.m. Eastern time.
An observer in north Texas named Lori Kinard posted her footage and pictures of the mysterious event on social media, and her followers speculated on the cause. They volunteered suggestions including aliens, transformers and meteors, as Kinard tells FOX 35’s Esther Bower.
Though other observers also suspected meteors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, set the record straight: The object that shot across the sky was a decommissioned SpaceX Starlink satellite, he announced in a social media post on Sunday.
Starlink-4682, launched in 2022 Aug, reentered at 0403 UTC Nov 10 (9:03pm MST/10:03 pm CST Nov 9) on a track over Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Oklahoma and appears to have been widely observed pic.twitter.com/u4sByf2SLe
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) November 10, 2024
The American Meteor Society received 36 reports of the fireball, witnessed across Colorado, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, with most of the testimonies coming from around Oklahoma City and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. What they actually saw was Starlink-4682—a satellite that launched into orbit in August 2022—in its final moments.
“For some reason I felt excited when I saw it. Like a kid again,” wrote observer Joe C in a report to the American Meteor Society. “Most amazing thing [I’ve] seen in a really long time.”
Since 2019, SpaceX has launched thousands of its Starlink satellites into what it calls a “constellation” around Earth to provide low-cost internet to its customers, even in remote areas. Currently, more than 6,000 of these satellites are in orbit around our planet.
“The company’s Starlink internet satellites are designed to burn up while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere at the end of their mission so as not to linger in orbit, becoming space junk,” Eric Lagatta writes for USA TODAY. Because Starlink satellites operate in low Earth orbit, atmospheric drag usually lowers them gradually, and they tend to burn up in the atmosphere within five years. If that doesn’t happen, however, SpaceX can trigger this process intentionally, known as a controlled deorbit.
SpaceX launches new Starlink satellites frequently—sometimes as often as two to four times per week—but these maneuvers are not without contention.
An X user asked McDowell if it’s true that at least one Starlink satellite re-enters Earth’s atmosphere every day—and if it’s true that humans should be concerned about resulting contamination of the ozone layer.
McDowell, who tracks Starlink satellites on his website, responded with a simple and stark: “Yes and yes.”
Astronomers and environmentalists argue that the aluminum oxide released by these satellites’ fiery re-entries can harm Earth’s ozone layer, which protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, per Space.com’s Brett Tingley. Both the burning satellites and the deteriorating ozone could raise the temperature of Earth’s upper atmosphere.
“If we don’t do anything, with the current growth rate of burning satellites, we will definitely see the impact globally within the next ten years,” Minkwan Kim, an expert in astronautics at the University of Southampton in England, told Space.com’s Tereza Pultarova last month. “We need to initiate discussions as soon as possible. With space debris, it took us 20 or 30 years to define a solution. With [the satellite air pollution] problem, if we move on the same kind of timescale, it might be too late.”
Spectators disappointed that what they saw on Saturday wasn’t a meteor can keep an eye out for real shooting stars during the upcoming Leonid meteor shower, which will peak this weekend.
