The mystery fireball seen over Australia was finally explained as being nothing more than a piece of space junk and not an asteroid, officials reported this morning.
At about 9:42 pm EST on Thursday evening numerous people in the eastern part of Australia - above Victoria and around New South Wales - saw a bright object moving in the sky, and took to Twitter and YouTube to post pictures and videos of the then unexplained object.
"Just saw a #meteor over North #Melbourne!" was just one of the many tweets sent out during the cosmic event.
Some of the reports indicated that the object was seen for ten seconds or more, which is exceptionally long for a meteor sighting, and others indicated a slower speed than they had seen in previous meteor sightings. The object was also reportedly followed by a "tail," or dust trail, as it entered the atmosphere.
Most people assumed it was a meteor, but Professor Brian Schmidt, an astronomer from the National University, looked at it from a more rational standpoint and at the tine speculated that it was in fact space junk.
Though, initially the Sydney Observatory disagreed with his assumption and sided with the public in believing that the fireball, or bolide, was a meteor.
"The object was likely to be a piece of an asteroid or space rock hitting the Earth's atmosphere," they wrote in a news release.
But the National Observatory finally put people's speculation to rest when it released a statement at 11:20 a.m. this morning saying that the bright object was indeed a piece of space debris. Specifically, it was the third-stage rocket that helped to take Russia's second Meteor-M weather satellite into orbit on July 8.
The massive metal object confused for a meteor can be seen here.