![]() The presumption of its existence has depended on reported public sightings, which have produced inconsistent findings. Scientists have proposed a number of hypotheses to explain reports of ball lightning over the centuries, but scientific data on ball lightning remain scarce. Laboratory experiments have produced effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, but how these relate to the supposed phenomenon remains unclear. An optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate. Descriptions of ball lightning appear in a variety of accounts over the centuries and have received attention from scientists. Some 19th-century reports describe balls that eventually explode and leave behind an odor of sulfur. Though usually associated with thunderstorms, the observed phenomenon is reported to last considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt, and is a phenomenon distinct from St. He says a similar glowing orb viewed over a large area of northern Siberia in 2017 was attributed to exhaust from ballistic missiles during test firings.Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon described as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. ![]() McDowell says rocket fuel dumps resulting in visible spheres of light occur fairly regularly in the lower 48 and elsewhere in the world. “End over end while spewing out this fuel like a garden hose, and so you’ll get this sort of moving pattern,” he said. “This cloud is probably hundreds of miles across, that’s why it looks so big,” he said.Īs to why rotating movement and a tail were observed, McDowell says that to maintain a rocket’s orbit during the release of fuel, the space craft is put into a tumble. McDowell says leftover rocket fuel was likely released into space where it froze, spread out and reflected sunlight. “This rocket - the Longmarch 6A or Chang Zheng 6A - was launched early on March 29 from China, placed 2 satellites in orbit and, calculating its orbital path, it passed over the Yukon area about 350 miles up at exactly the time that this glow was seen in the Alaskan sky.” “I am very confident that what people saw was the dumping of fuel from a Chinese rocket stage,” he said. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston, Massachusetts, says sightings of the orb in Alaska correspond with the flight of a Chinese satellite deployment rocket. “A glowing cloud of gas that was sunlit would look like that,” he said. Speaking last week, Conde said he wasn’t sure what to attribute the phenomenon to, but he noted that the orb appeared gaseous. University of Alaska Fairbanks physics professor Mark Conde says the orb was also recorded by a UAF all-sky camera in Gakona. “It’s not like it shot across the sky,” he said. Smallwood says the foggy ball of light was far larger than a full moon and moved through the sky from the northeast to the southwest over a few minutes. “It seemed like it had something that was spinning inside it when I zoomed in on it,” he said. (Courtesy of Leslie Smallwood)Ī week after a large orb of light was seen moving across the early morning Alaska sky, scientists have offered an explanation.įairbanks photographer Leslie Smallwood captured video of the luminous sphere on automated aurora cameras before 5 a.m. Still video image of an orb of light, as seen from Fairbanks, moving across the sky before 5 AM March 29th.
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