The enigmatic lights that appeared on the evening of June 23rd in the sky of many regions of southern Italy, around 9.10 pm, have intrigued many, so much so that I went around the web. There has been no shortage of imaginative hypotheses, but the most well-founded at the moment is that the second stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket generated the phenomenon. The large bluish halo in the sky was the gases expelled from the engines, clearly visible like the grouping of Starlink satellites for internet connections, a phenomenon that occurs at every Falcon 9 rocket launch, but is rarely visible. With the launch on June 23, SpaceX reached the record number of 1,000 Starlinks launched in the first 6 months of 2024.
«Given that it is difficult to be certain of what happened because the launches carried out by SpaceX are accompanied by incomplete public information, almost like the launches carried out by the former Soviet Union or China, analyzing the videos and comparing the times it is quite certain it is a second stage of Falcon 9″, Luciano Anselmo, of the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council and expert in spatial dynamics, told ANSA. Typically, Starlink launches carried out with Falcon 9 rockets involve, a few minutes after departure, the separation of the first stage – which returns to Earth a short distance from the launch site – while the journey of the satellites continues with the thrust ensured by the engines of the second stage.
“Within one or two orbits, a time consistent with the sighting over the Italian skies, the caravan of satellites is released and the second stage carries out maneuvers which will then allow its re-entry, with destruction in the atmosphere”, he added Anselmo. In the videos you would see exactly this phase: a large bluish halo due to the gases expelled from the engines, a very bright point behind it, the second stage, and not far away a strip of light, i.e. the satellites aligned but not yet spaced from each other. «The movement in the sky – he specified – makes it plausible to think that they are approximately at an altitude of around 300 kilometres, already in space, but not yet in the final orbits».
It would therefore not be the rocket’s booster, as reported by some sites, as the booster performs the re-entry maneuver a few minutes after launch and at a significantly lower altitude. «Under certain conditions of light and visibility, burnt gases can produce truly spectacular effects, and numerous even more striking cases have been seen», added Anselmo. «It should certainly be noted – he added – that every ignition of the engines at these altitudes transiently alters the highest layers of the atmosphere where there is a very low density of molecules. The gases released or produced in the atmosphere with each launch can create disturbances that are reabsorbed, but also long-term effects whose consequences we do not yet know well. And above all, the studies we have date back to periods where the number of launches was much lower.”
The ever-increasing number of launches is precisely one of the aspects on which SpaceX has focused most in recent years for the putting into orbit of Starlink, the large constellation for internet services available throughout the planet, which in just a few years has exceeded 6,000 units .COPYRIGHT LASICILIA.IT © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
