A powerful Japanese telescope earlier this month captured video of a spiraling blue star hovering over a volcano in Hawaii. Was it a flying saucer from the confines of the universe? We take stock.
• Also read: Artificial intelligence could have received alien signals
• Also read: NASA has discovered a “bear’s head” on Mars
“Subaru-Asahi has filmed a mysterious flying spiral,” wrote the Twitter account of the telescope, which is perched atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano.
The phenomenon occurred in the early morning of January 18 beneath the dormant volcano at an altitude of 4200m. What was initially just a small white dot in the sky turned into a bluish vortex before disappearing.
The spiral appears to be linked to the launch of a new satellite from SpaceX, a company founded by billionaire Elon Musk.
That day, at approximately 7:24 a.m. Montreal time, SpaceX launched a global positioning satellite into medium orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The satellite was seen just before 5 a.m. (10 a.m. Montreal time), almost three hours after its orbit. According to several netizens, the emission of the remaining fuel is the origin of the spiral.
Not the first time…not the last time
This is not the first time such a spiral has been observed in the starry sky. Last April, Japan’s Subaru telescope also captured a similar spiral in the Hawaiian sky.
In June 2022, a similar phenomenon occurred in the skies of Queenstown, New Zealand, the same day a Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral.
It would essentially be a cloud of water and carbon dioxide illuminated by the sun.
− With information from the Washington Post