Warrnambool security guard captures rare sight in the sky

Warrnambool security guard Wayne Stevenson stepped outside at the hospital about midnight on Tuesday morning and saw the light in the sky and got out his phone just in time to capture the video.

"I was just outside doing an external patrol and I looked up at the sky and I saw the object and it hadn't broken up at that stage," she said.

He said normally when you see things like that in the sky they are gone by the time you've had time to think about what it is. "This one just stayed there," he said.

He managed to captured a photo of it before the object started to break up.

"I thought it would disappear any second and it didn't. I just kept on following it and watched it break up," Mr Stevenson said.

He said working nights he had seen plenty of shooting stars and meteors but nothing like this, and nothing that had stayed in the sky for that amount of time.

"What's even more cool is that I was in the right place at the right time with a camera in my hand," he said.

The light flashes - which could also be seen in Melbourne - were probably the remnants of a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket that launched earlier in the evening from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome spaceport, the Australian Space Agency said.

The spaceport is about 800km north of Moscow.

"According to Russian authorities, the launch placed a new-generation GLONASS-K2 global navigation satellite into orbit," the agency said.

A bright light spotted over Melbourne was probably Russian space junk re-entering the atmosphere.

"This launch was notified, and remnants of the rocket were planned to safely re-enter the atmosphere into the ocean off the southeast coast of Tasmania."

The agency said it would continue to monitor how the re-entry went, along with its government partners.

Scientists backed up the Russian rocket theory.

Flinders University space archaeology expert Alice Gorman said the rocket's second stage, which weighed 105 tonnes and was 25 metres long, was cast off at extremely high altitude after its fuel was expended.

"Many Melburnians saw the rocket streaking across the sky as it broke into pieces, each one continuing to burn in a spectacular fireworks show," Dr Gorman said.

"Any surviving parts of the rocket would have ended up in the sea."

She said even though the rocket was moving much slower than a meteor, it was still fast enough to break the sound barrier.

Dr Gorman said farmers reported their animals were agitated in 1979 after the US Skylab space station fell back to earth over Western Australia, causing another sonic boom.

Victorians and Tasmanians saw an identical rocket stage from the launch of a military satellite from Plesetsk burning up in May 2020.

"It's not unheard of for Soyuz rocket stages to re-enter over Australia," Dr Gorman said.

Swinburne University of Technology chief scientist Professor Virginia Kilborn said it was also possible the fireball was a meteor that broke up as it hit the earth's atmosphere.

Australian Associated Press

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