A Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station has shared video of five ‘objects’ flying over Earth.
The objects were tracked down in a video intended to document the aurora seen as the space station flew over Antarctica.
But Ivan Vagner, a cosmonaut who arrived at the floating lab in April, notes that he had seen something unexpected when he took the images for the video.
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It shows five “objects flying past,” he said. “In the video you will see something different, not just the aurora.
“What do you think these are? Meteors, satellites or …?” he wrote in a tweet.
The most likely explanation for the unusual video is that the five objects are Starlink satellites, part of a constellation launched by Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX to provide internet to humans on Earth. These satellites fly together in orbit, and are remarkably bright because they do so – after criticizing the ruin of the Neowise comet’s sight and potentially interfering with the observations of astronomers of the night sky.
SpaceX launched a new set of 58 Starlink satellites on Tuesday morning, and the satellites will fly in particularly close formation after being launched for the first time. Mr. Vagner did not say when the images were taken, but he shared them roughly a day after these satellites were sent into space.
It could also be that the objects are not in space at all, but that the bright lights are the result of glare from the windows of the ISS, like dust on the camera lens, which the images interfere if they were made.
Mr. Vagner notes that he took one image per second, and that these were then stitched into the moving video, meaning that the lights may not have actually moved in the way they appear.
But the cosmonaut tweeted that he had passed the information to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and that in addition to experts, he conducted the “further analysis” to be sure what the objects are.
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Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust that stands three light-years high, bursting with jets of gas from inverted stars, was captured by Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010.
Nasa / ESA / STScI
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The first selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012
Nasa / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
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Death of a star: This image from Nandra’s Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy
Nasa
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Arrokoth, the farthest object ever explored, pictured here on January 1, 2019 by a camera on Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth
Getty
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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 matter
Nasa
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The first ever image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon telescope as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, released on April 10, 2019. The image reveals the black hole in the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole inhabits about 54 million light-years from Earth
Getty
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Pluto, as pictured by Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft when it first flew over the dwarf planet in July 2015
Nasa / APL / SwRI
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A coronal mass emission as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time Chandra has discovered this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun
Nasa
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Dark, narrow, 100-meter-long stripes running on the surface of Mars were thought to be evidence of current flowing water. Since then it has been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand
Nasa / JPL / University of Arizona
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Morning Aurora: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photo of the International Space Station’s Aurora green lights in October 2015
Nasa / Scott Kelly
1/10
Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust that stands three light-years high, bursting with jets of gas from inverted stars, was captured by Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010.
Nasa / ESA / STScI
2/10
The first selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012
Nasa / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
3/10
Death of a star: This image from Nandra’s Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy
Nasa
4/10
Arrokoth, the farthest object ever explored, pictured here on January 1, 2019 by a camera on Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles 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 matter
Nasa
6/10
The first ever image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon telescope as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, released on April 10, 2019. The image reveals the black hole in the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole inhabits about 54 million light-years from Earth
Getty
7/10
Pluto, as pictured by Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft when it first flew over the dwarf planet in July 2015
Nasa / APL / SwRI
8/10
A coronal mass emission as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time Chandra has discovered this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun
Nasa
9/10
Dark, narrow, 100-meter-long stripes running on the surface of Mars were thought to be evidence of current flowing water. Since then it has been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand
Nasa / JPL / University of Arizona
10/10
Morning Aurora: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photo of the International Space Station’s Aurora green lights in October 2015
Nasa / Scott Kelly
A spokesman for the space agency, Vladimir Ustimenko, said on television that it was too soon to know for sure what the objects might be.
“It is too early to draw conclusions until our researchers and scientists from Roscosmos at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences tell us what they think,” he told Russian news agency TASS.
“It was decided to hand over those materials to experts, who will tell us what that was in their opinion.”
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