Weird flash appears over Kyiv and no one knows what it is
Topics: Space, News, World News, Ukraine, NASA
Ali Condon
Featured Image Credit: Twitter / @olex_scherba
Topics: Space, News, World News, Ukraine, NASA
Experts were left scratching their heads after a mysterious flash of light lit up the sky in Kyiv on Wednesday (19 April) night - but now we have a possible explanation.
Just minutes before an air raid alarm went off in the Ukrainian capital, the bright flash appeared in the sky, sparking concern among locals. Check it out:
The bright spark went off at around 10pm on Wednesday night.
Advert
In one clip, it looked as though a flaming object had fallen to the ground.
Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the flash was gone and the city returned to darkness.
It was a little eerie, to say the least.
Although an air raid alert was activated, the head of Kyiv's military administration Serhiy Popko assured that 'air defence was not in operation.'
Meanwhile, a statement from Ukraine's Air Force also confirmed: "At the current time there is no risk of the enemy using air attack weapons."
Kyiv officials theorised that it might have been a falling NASA satellite, referring particularly to an old RHESSI satellite that the US space agency had just announced was expected to re-enter the earth's atmosphere this week.
The RHESSI satellite, which had been created to observe solar flares, was launched into Earth's orbit back in 2002, but was decommissioned in 2018.
But NASA has denied any involvement, confirming that their satellite was still in orbit at the time of the flash, and wasn't due to re-enter Earth's atmosphere until later that night.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell also tweeted on Wednesday that it was impossible for NASA's satellite to have caused the bright flash.
"The bright flash seen over Kyiv has NOTHING TO DO with the reentry of NASA's RHESSI satellite, whose orbit doesn't come within thousands of kilometers of Ukraine," he tweeted.
That sent experts right back to the drawing board.
It wasn't long before Ukrainian social media was flooded with theories about what that mysterious bright light might have been - the favourite theory, of course, being aliens.
Air Force spokesman Yuri Ihnat has told Ukranian media that the flash was seen as far as Belarus.
While experts still haven't been able to tie down what exactly caused that flash, they now suspect it was probably a meteorite entering the dense layers of the earth's atmosphere, and not a Russian air attack.
A statement from Ukraine's space agency said that the light was 'probably related to the entry of a cosmic body into the dense layers of the atmosphere.'