What looks like some kind of strange fireball almost hanging in the sky is grabbing the attention of many on social media.
Lee-Anne Peters captured footage of the object over Hobart, on the Australian island of Tasmania on Tuesday.
“I set my alarm to wake up early because it was my daughter’s 16th birthday,” she told BuzzFeed. “My kitchen window has a great view of the eastern sky… Looking out the window while cooking I saw the object.”
But experts believe it’s not a fireball, and not, as some on social media claim, an alien spaceship.
It’s just an ordinary airplane.
“The length of time that the object was visible for and its apparent speed both support this hypothesis,” Chris Arkle, an Astronomer at Tasmania’s Launceston Planetarium, told Australia’s ABC.
He said a meteor or space junk burning up in the atmosphere would move faster.
ABC said users on social media even matched it to an Emirates Airbus A380 flight bound for Auckland that was over the airspace at the same time Peters shot her footage.
David Finlay of Australian Meteor Reports agreed, calling it “a beautiful video of an A380 contrail.”
“It is not uncommon for people to mistake jet contrails for meteors, especially in the afternoon and in the western sky as the sun sets,” he told The Mercury. “I’ve watched some people looking at contrails who even thought they were seeing a comet.”
Peters seemed satisfied with the explanation. After initially posted that she had seen a “fireball meteorite,” she wrote on Facebook that it was a “a spectacular plane colored by the rising sun.”
Mystery, solved.
“It was definitely quite an exciting start to the day,” she told Buzzfeed.
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