‘Slice of fire’ dazzles across the East Coast sky, but it’s not a star. What was it?
As the white and yellow flash of light streaked across the East Coast sky, several people stopped to watch, wondering what it was.
“Yo, it literally looks like a slice of fire going through the sky,” one person said in a video shared with the American Meteor Society.
Around 7:41 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 18, the agency received 47 reports of what many thought was a comet, but for some, the flash of light was too deviant to have just been a fireball.
“I heard there was a visible comet tonight, so I thought it might be that, but it was so bright that it couldn’t have been,” one person wrote in the remarks section of their report on the AMS website.
The observer said they caught a glimpse of the curious light standing in a crowded Epcot Center in Bay Lake, Florida.
“It really looked like something out of a movie,” they said.
According to Space.com, people might have been able to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS — which became visible to some parts of the United States earlier in the month — on Oct. 18, but the comet’s visibility is “a balance between the trifecta of its intrinsic brightness, the darkness of the sky it’s in, and moonlight.”
The American Meteor Society said on its website, however, that what people had recorded was more likely a rocket launch.
The time of the reports coincide with a SpaceX rocket launch, which happened around 7:13 p.m. at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, according to a statement by the organization.
Twenty Starlink satellites were launched into orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, becoming the ninth Starlink mission, SpaceX said.
