The skies above Northern California were alight with streaks of flame.
Unfortunately for those with a rampant imagination, the spectacle wasn't an episode of "The X-Files" mythology unfolding before us. In reality, it was just space junk re-entering the atmosphere, and while not necessarily quite as exciting, it does show that sometimes the mundane can produce unexpected moments of profound beauty.
According to Jonathan McDowell, a renowned astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the junk originates from the International Space Station, where it was ejected as a piece of defunct communications equipment back in 2020. "What you're seeing is some actually very small objects releasing a lot of energy, very high up, traveling extremely fast," McDowell
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