A glowing ring of metal fell to Earth, and no one has any idea what it is

It’s been more than a week since reports first emerged of a “glowing metal ring” falling from the sky and crashing near a remote village in Kenya.

The object weighed 1,100 pounds (500 kg) and had a diameter of more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) when measured after landing on December 30, according to the Kenya Space Agency. A couple of days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object turned out to be a piece of space debris, claiming that it was a ring that had separated from the rocket. “Such objects are typically designed to burn up upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere or to fall into uninhabited areas such as oceans,” the space agency said. told The New York Times.

Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small team of space trackers have been using open-source data to try to pinpoint which space object hit Kenya. It has not yet been possible to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.

Now some space trackers believe the object may not have come from space at all.

Did it really come from outer space?

Space is becoming increasingly crowded, but large pieces of metal from rockets typically do not float around Earth’s orbit undetected and untraceable.

“It has been suggested that the ring is space debris, but there is little evidence.” wrote Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is highly regarded for his analysis of space objects. “The most likely space-related possibility is the return of the SYLDA adapter from Ariane V184 object 33155. However, I am not entirely convinced that the ring is space debris at all,” he wrote.

Another well-known space researcher, Marco Langbroek, believes it is likely that the ring came from space, so he continued to study objects that could have returned around the time of the discovery of the object in Kenya. IN blog post written on Wednesday He noted that in addition to the metal ring, other fragments similar to space debris were found several kilometers from the ring, including material similar to carbon film and insulating foil.