An unidentified object with burning smoke was seen in the sky over Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Nikolai Zheleznov, senior researcher at the Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explained to socialbites.ca that this could be a used stage of a previously launched rocket or an asteroid.
“It was most likely some type of asteroid that hit the Earth. Approximately hundreds of thousands of meteorites fall on our Earth annually, usually in the form of small pebbles, flying dust particles, comet swarms, and meteor swarms. This is either some kind of body about 20-30 meters long, like the Chelyabinsk phenomenon in 2013, or some kind of spent rocket stage. It needs to be checked whether there is a missile fire or not. There is little information, the speed of movement of the body in the atmosphere is unclear. “It’s hard to say, there are two options: either an artificial body, you just need to check it, it must be big enough, not a burned-out little satellite, or a spent stage of some kind of rocket, or the real body, a fireball,” he said.
According to Zheleznov, data on the sighting of Comet Pons-Brooks in the sky are absolutely wrong.
“This is not the Pons-Brooks comet they are talking about. It is quite large and flies very far. I’m not ruling out that it’s kind of a part of it. “But this is definitely not Comet Pons-Brooks, I guarantee you that,” he explained.
On March 25, images of Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk-on-Amur residents noticing an unidentified flying object in the sky followed by burning smoke breaking into small pieces appeared on the Internet.
Local media suggested that this was Comet Pons-Brookes, discovered in 1812.
Previously residents of Angarsk said about the bright flash of a falling meteor.