A "meteor shower" that lit up the skies over northern Western Australia earlier this week was actually the wreckage of a Chinese rocket falling out of orbit.
Streaks of light lit up the skies over Broome in the early hours of Monday morning, with sonic booms reverberating around the town.
Several locals captured the moment on videos that were posted to social media, showing debris breaking up and streaking across the night sky at around 12:30am on Monday.
Glen Brough said he was up late after a police chase near his house when he saw the light show but thought the debris was missiles or flares.
"I was sitting on the driveway with my partner ... and she was like, 'What is that?' And the sky was just lit up, completely lit up," he said.
"We honestly thought that they were missiles."
Light show caused by space junk
Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the ABC the light show was created by a piece of a Chinese Long March 3 rocket breaking up in the atmosphere.
The rocket stage was launched in July last year and left in geo-stationary orbit until, according to Dr McDowell, it eventually fell back to earth as its orbit dipped into the atmosphere
"It [the rocket] launched a communications satellite called Tian Lian, which is actually a relay satellite that the Chinese astronauts on the Chinese space station use," he said.
Using publicly available data from the United States Space Command, which tracks space junk in earth's orbit, Dr McDowell, plotted the re-entry path of the rocket stage for the ABC.
"The path showed that it goes east over the entry point right over Broome and across northern Australia, so both the direction is right, and the timing is right," Dr McDowell said.
Kimberley astronomer Greg Quicke said the slow pace of the streaks captured in the footage indicated they were space junk.
"It looks to me like space junk coming into the atmosphere and I say that because of the speed of them," Mr Quicke said.
Dr McDowell said it was possible that some fragments from the rocket that burnt up over Broome might have even made it back to Earth in Western Australia.
"Just a few weeks ago we had another Chinese rocket stage that came down over Gujarat in India and parts of that stage survived," he said.
"It's not impossible that you could find the same thing in Western Australia; just a few small pieces of the rocket can survive re-entry and end up on the ground."
This re-entry sighting comes just months after another piece of a Chinese rocket, used in a different mission, crashed into the far side of the moon.
Space junk a growing concern
According to Dr McDowell, the Long March 3 rocket is China's widely used older-generation "workhorse", which is set to be superseded by the larger Long March 5B rocket in the future.
The Long March 5B is a potential worry, said Dr McDowell, because it leaves a bigger rocket stage in orbit that has resulted in large objects falling on towns in Africa in the past.
"This 20-tonne rocket stage, one time it re-entered over west Africa and there were 20-metre-long metal rods crashing into villages in west Africa," Dr McDowell said.
Curtin University astronomer Hadrien Devillepoix said space agencies always aimed for re-entry to occur in unpopulated areas, which is why it is rare to see them captured on video.
"The south Pacific, for example, is usually one of the preferred graveyard areas for spacecraft, but occasionally you get stuff like Skylab that came down over Western Australia," he said.
Booming sounds were heard by locals who posted footage of the rocket part re-entry, with Mr Brough confirming they reverberated around the town a minute after the light show finished.
"I reckon every single dog in Broome started barking. It was just an eruption of dogs after that and, yeah, it was pretty scary actually," he said.
According to Dr Devillepoix they could have been hypersonic booms that are caused by the objects re-entering the Earth's atmosphere breaking the sound barrier.
"It's basically the same sonic booms you hear, if you happen to have a jet fighter going hypersonic through the atmosphere — it makes a fairly big shockwave," he said.
"But It's usually quite high up in the atmosphere, so it's usually unlikely that these shockwaves make it to the ground ... but it's definitely possible."
Despite the shockwaves and how overwhelming it was to watch the moment play out in real time, Mr Brough said it will stick with him for a while to come.
