secret fireballs mottle across the sky and clangoring - land in Chile last calendar week , setting both the background and curiosity ablaze . What they were and where they come from is still a whodunit , as afirst analysishas just ruled out the obvious favorite : meteorite .
On September 25 , witnesses report reckon blaze bolide light up the sky over Chiloé Island , in the archipelago off southern Chile . Not long after , low bush fires were report in seven locations across the island , which were quickly put out by volunteers .
The obvious explanation , as astrophysicist andChilean of the Year , Jose Maza toldnational spreader TVN , was a meteorite or distance junk . Residents noted the fireball was moving extremely quickly , burning a bright red , which suggested a meteor , but space junk is just as uncouth , with around 200 - 400 known objects falling each year .
However , official from the National Service of Geology and Mining have since analyzed the charred sites strewn across the Ithiel Town of Dalcahue and discover no evidence of a meteorite .
“ [ G]eologists went to the internet site examining the surface area of the guess wallop . They forge on seven points stand for to burnt brush , where they find no corpse , vestige , or evidence of a meteorite fall , ” thereport stated .
The geologists told TVN that they have roll up ground sampling for a more thorough psychoanalysis , and will liberate their conclusions in a few week .
So , technically what we have here flop now is an nameless flight object . Yep , a UFO .
Since it ’s extremely unconvincing to be stranger , and a meteorite seems to have been ruled out , the most likely scenario is some kind of blank junk falling to Earth . for the most part we are unaware of the majority of space junk as it usually burns up in the atmosphere , falls in the ocean ( which covers 70 pct of the satellite ) , or nation somewhere remote and unpopulated .
It ’s very rarified for place debris to really hit the land near hoi polloi , andno one has ever been killedor earnestly injured by falling detritus . The only known occurrences of people being hit by space debris are five Japanese skimmer on a ship that was impinge on by falling pieces of a Russian spacecraft in 1969 , and a odd event in 1997 where a woman inthe USgot gently brushed by cloth that change by reversal out to be from a Delta 2 Eruca sativa booster .
The most famous space debris event , of course , affect the space stations Mir and Skylab . America ’s first blank space station , Skylab , had a memorable return to Earth in 1979 when part of it crash - land in Western Australia , whofined the US for litter . Mir , Russia ’s space station , fell to Earth in 2001 . Thelargest object to ever reenter Earth ’s atmosphere , it fortunately landed in the Pacific Ocean , but not before we trip up some salient scenes of it blazing across the sky .
