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A Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station shared a video of five “objects” flying over Earth.
The objects were spotted in a video intended to document the auroras seen as the space station flew over Antarctica.
But Ivan Vagner, a cosmonaut who arrived at the floating lab in April, noted that he saw something unexpected while capturing the footage for video.
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In it, five “objects appear to be flying nearby,” he said. “In the video you will see something else, not just the aurora.
“What do you think they are? Meteors, satellites or…?” he wrote in a tweet.
The most likely explanation for this unusual video is that the five objects are Starlink satellites, which are part of a constellation launched by Elon Musk’s private company, SpaceX, to provide the internet to people on Earth. These satellites fly together in orbit and are notoriously bright the way they do – after being criticized for ruining the sight of Comet Neowise and potentially interfering with astronomers’ observations of the night sky.
SpaceX launched a new set of 58 Starlink satellites on Tuesday morning, and the satellites are flying in particularly close formation after their first launch. Mr Vagner did not say when the images were taken, but he shared them about a day after these satellites were sent into space.
It could also be that the objects are not in space at all, but the bright lights are the result of glare from the windows of the ISS, or dust on the camera lens, which interfered with the images as they were taken.
Mr Vagner noted that he takes one frame per second and these are then stitched into the moving video, meaning the lights may not have moved the way they appear.
But the cosmonaut tweeted that he passed the information on to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and that, alongside experts, they were conducting a “deeper analysis” to be sure of the nature of the objects.
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Pluto, as shown by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it first flew over the dwarf planet in July 2015
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A coronal mass ejection seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun
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Dark and narrow streaks 100 meters long descending on the surface of Mars are believed to be evidence of contemporary water flow. It has since been suggested that they might instead be formed by flowing sand
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Morning Aurora: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of green aurora lights from the International Space Station in October 2015
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1/10
Mystic Mountain, a three light-years-tall pillar of gas and dust teeming with jets of nascent star gas buried inside, was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010.
Nasa / ESA / STScI
2/10
The very first selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover at the start of its Mars exploration mission in 2012
Nasa / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
3/10
Death of a star: This image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope shows Tycho’s supernova, a star in our Milky Way galaxy
Nasa
4/10
Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on January 1, 2019 by a camera on NASA’s New Horizons space raft at a distance of 4.1 billion kilometers from Earth
Getty
5/10
An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space like this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust.
Nasa
6/10
The very first image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving NASA, and released on April 10, 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light years from Earth
Getty
7/10
Pluto, as shown by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it first flew over the dwarf planet in July 2015
Nasa / APL / SwRI
8/10
A coronal mass ejection seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun
Nasa
9/10
Dark and narrow streaks 100 meters long descending on the surface of Mars are believed to be evidence of contemporary water flow. It has since been suggested that they might instead be formed by flowing sand
Nasa / JPL / University of Arizona
10/10
Morning Aurora: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of green aurora lights from the International Space Station in October 2015
Nasa / Scott Kelly
A spokesperson for the space agency, Vladimir Ustimenko, said on television that it was too early to know for sure what the objects might be.
“It is too early to draw any conclusions until our researchers from Roscosmos and our scientists at the Institute for Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences tell us what they think,” he said. he said, Russian news agency TASS reported.
“It was decided to hand these materials over to experts, who will tell us what they think it is.”
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