2023-09-29 01:33:00
What happened during the Tarbes night this Wednesday? Theories are multiplying on the internet, as spotted France 3 Occitanie. A luminous circle with a long trail in its wake was seen in the sky, suggesting a meteor. “All this is easily explained. It is an entry of dust into the atmosphere which is consumed. The more dust there is, the greater the trail that follows the light point. Sometimes, it’s as bright as during the full moon,” explains Olivier Sanguy, amateur astronomer and space news manager at the Cité de l’espace in Toulouse, interviewed by our colleagues.
“Now we call it a meteoroid: a solid object moving in interplanetary space, much smaller in size than an asteroid. An asteroid must be at least 1 meter in diameter,” he continues.
A piece of rocket?
But this drag could also have been caused by something else entirely: “We can also think that it is a rocket stage or a piece of satellite which returns to the atmosphere. Often, we then observe a longer trail behind.” A theory that has some problems: “But when we launch a satellite now via a rocket, scientists pay a lot of attention to this kind of pollution. We do it very cleanly. The upper stages that launch the satellite remain in orbit and are brought back later. »
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