Mysterious blue fireball streaks above Western Australia, puzzling astronomers

The strange fireball was caught on video.

A streak of blue light that flashed across the sky on Monday surprised western Australia's night owls and befuddled the astronomy community. 

The blue fireball was seen at 1 a.m. local time on June 15, according to ABC News Pilbara. "It was really a spectacular observation," Glen Nagle, the education and outreach manager at the CSIRO-NASA tracking station in Canberra, told the news agency. Sightings were reported across the remote Pilbara region as well as in the country's Northern Territory and in South Australia, Nagle said. 

Many observers caught the phenomenon on video. The fireball streaks steadily across the sky. At first, it appears orange or yellow, with a short tail streaming behind it. After a few seconds, the bulk of the fireball lights up blue.

Scientists aren't quite sure what object was burning up in the atmosphere to create the brilliant light show, according to ABC News. Some amateur astronomers speculated that the object could be human-made debris, perhaps from a recent rocket launch. But that seems unlikely, Renae Sayers, a research ambassador at Curtin University's Space Science and Technology Centre, told the news agency. 

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By Stephanie Pappas / Freelance Science Writer

Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science. She covers the world of human and animal behavior, as well as paleontology and other science topics. Stephanie has a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has ducked under a glacier in Switzerland and poked hot lava with a stick in Hawaii. Stephanie hails from East Tennessee, the global center for salamander diversity.

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(Source: livescience.com; June 16, 2020; https://tinyurl.com/y72bh2dc)
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