A bubble-like burst of light captured on two Hawaii telescopes last week likely has a terrestrial origin, observers say. What looks like a giant bubble rising and expanding in space in this video taken on 22 June from Hawaii is actually just exhaust from a missile launch.
Atmospheric flare from a minuteman III ICBM missile
Astronomer Phil Plait brought the video – and the missile explanation – to public notice on June 29 in his blog, Bad Astronomy.
One suggestion was that the timing was right for the source to be a Minuteman III missile, which had launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base a few minutes earlier. One possibility is that fuel released by the missile’s third stage could have expanded quickly into the rarefied atmosphere, creating the bubble.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell of Harvard University, who tracks space launches, agrees with that assessment. “I am 100 per cent sure that it was Glory Trip 204, a test launch of the Minuteman III missile … launched on a trajectory southwest to Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, and that what was seen was associated with the firing of the third stage solid rocket motor,” he told New Scientist. “The only question is the exact physics of the observational phenomena associated with the rocket motor’s plume.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that a strange sky phenomenon proved to be the work of humans. In 2009, a weird spiral hallow above Norway turned out to be caused by a failed Russian missile launch. And in November 2010, a mysterious cloud that looked like a missile trail was likely just an ordinary aircraft contrail.
Filed under: Astronomy News
